Apocalyptic science fiction returns to this image often, to show us what humanity looks like under pressure, but also how the noble instinct to willingly stand against something incomprehensibly vast and destructive depends on a chosen belief. Characters we admire act as their choices will matter, as if the people they love will be saved, as if their choices carry meaning.

I’ve loved apocalyptic science fiction since the first time my Dad sat me down to watch “Interstellar” (2014), drawn in by Matthew McConaughey’s terrific portrayal of anguish, the otherworldly pink-purple hues of Nolan’s space, and Hans Zimmer playing over vast cornfields. But above all, what drew me in was the exploration of characters bifurcated to both ends of potential. When one man chooses self-preservation and sets back humanity’s rescue mission, another chooses to save humanity: an act of love for his family, even if it means sacrificing years with them. When characters rely on this core self-belief to sacrifice for an unpromised greater good, rather than the instinctual reflex of survival, we are moved.

Humanity pushed to the extreme gives us a grotesque view of what we are capable of in desperation. But it also allows us to access the pinnacle of human potential: invention, ingenuity, or even something as basic as compassion. Apocalyptic sci-fi forces us to turn the metaphorical infrared light on, to see the core of human nature (the good and the bad) more clearly. In a way, polarity of circumstance forces purity of reaction. Without the Petrova line, there is no destruction. Without the Petrova line, there is no potential — no beauty.

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road follows a father-son duo who persist in being good people while traversing a post-apocalyptic wasteland, holding tightly onto humanity when it is easier to live without virtues. In a world largely devoid of civility and bleakly savage in classic McCarthy style, the love between the pair and the dogged insistence to “continue carrying the fire” is the very reason that keeps them going down “the road.” The duo is driven by faith in a greater purpose, even if that purpose is, at its core, an act of self-deception.

McCarthy asks: if you stripped away every other identifier, any reasonable context, what remains? It is our morals, the love we have for others, and the desperate belief in the existence of those qualities. Ursula Le Guin, a pioneer of exploring sociological themes in science fiction, portrays this well in The Left Hand of Darkness; her protagonist experiences a great, inhumane struggle and remarks:

“It is a terrible thing, this kindness that human beings do not lose. Terrible, because when we are finally naked in the dark and cold, it is all we have. We who are so rich, so full of strength, we end up with that small change. We have nothing else to give.”

It’s doubly compelling when our character wasn’t destined for greatness in the world as we know it today. Ryland Grace begins as a disgraced professor who refuses to join the Project Hail Mary suicide mission. Yet when Grace wakes up, drugged and kidnapped on the ship against his will with a lagging memory, he is driven to save. He may have not made the heroic choice the first time, but when he discovers there is hope to return home, he chooses to be selfless nonetheless. While the noble choice of saving billions of faceless people is unfathomably difficult to make, it becomes easy to “find someone to be brave for,” the belief that even one person (or alien) is enough. While the first choice asked him to sacrifice, the second choice asked him to give.

Project Hail Mary hit the theaters as a box-office success; it’s well-directed, beautifully shot, and features great acting. I suspect it’s also caught national attention because it speaks of hope when various different crises are happening — the decline of U.S. hegemony, various global wars and conflicts, and the ever-looming threat of AI. The latter is especially relevant; as our reality begins to match closer and closer to what we used to consider as science fiction, it’s undoubtedly comforting to hear stories of human triumph against alien technologies and impart optimism that we will stay loving1, useful, and brave through unpredictable times.

Unlike other fiction, these stories feature no true villains, but rather people grappling with uncontrollable circumstances — climate change, star-eating aliens, chemical warfare — in a more extreme way, how reality often feels. Yet in these stories, we see acts of heroism2 played out not as naive, fated givens, but as the meaningful consequences of an individual’s decision.

We feel inspired when Grace faces down the Petrova line because it is an exaggeration of decisions we make every day, and the appropriate conduit for how overwhelming those choices may feel. We feel such sweeping emotions when we see splashy heroism on the big screen and the novels that inspired them because we are moved by what they suggest — that it is not hopeless to believe in authentic goodness and seek genuine greatness even in hopeless situations. We feel relief when the belief does not go unnoticed; it is not meaningless.

In some great irony, apocalyptic sci-fi is a campaign against nihilism, especially when it concerns the people you love. As Ted Chiang, one of the greatest modern sci-fi authors, writes in his book Exhalation:

“Pretend that you have free will. It’s essential that you behave as if your decisions matter, even though you know they don’t. The reality isn’t important; what’s important is your belief, and believing the lie is the only way to avoid a waking coma. Civilization now depends on self-deception. Perhaps it always has.”

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Honorable mentions - other apocalyptic sci-fi I loved:

• Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler: Troubled protagonist Lauren looks not to the stars, but to the Earth in a grounded, spiritual, and community-forward solution as she traverses a post-apocalyptic California.

• “Arrival” (2016) dir. Denis Villeneuve / “Story of Your Life and Others” by Ted Chiang: Louise Banks’ feat of creativity, genius in translation allows her to literally see the future and prevent global warfare; an incredible story of human triumph when faced with alien circumstances and technologies.

• [SPOILER] Last of Us (2023): Our protagonist chooses one individual’s life over saving the world from a zombie apocalypse, an interesting experiment of hope not found in heroism but in our everyday relationships.

• The Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu, “Mono No Aware”: In the way a game of Go has no true individual “heroes” (vs. that of chess), one’s sacrifice to save the last remnants of humanity is indicative of someone part of a greater web, holding it together.

• “Children of Men” (2006) dir. Alfonso Cuarón: Amid a global infertility crisis and societal collapse, the sight of a single pregnant woman and the hope she represents brings fighting in a refugee camp to a sudden halt.

These are signals toward a renewed emphasis on taste, that while production has become table stakes, curating the right sort of content will now give you an edge. Tech writer Anu from Working Theory puts it well:

“In a world of scarcity, we treasure tools. In a world of abundance, we treasure taste.”

Taste is the ability to tell whether or not something looks good or feels right, an intuition shaped through multiple acts of judgement. Fundamentally, as Nietzsche says, “all of life is a dispute over taste and tasting”; our personal tastes are an expression of our morals, values, culture, upbringing — highly individual. Pierre Bourdieu writes that while taste feels personal, it is reinforced and learned by communities and institutions (echoed by some tech writers about how objective taste calibrates around communities).

Perhaps reframing taste from the dichotomy of relativism vs. absolutism, it’s more appropriate to think of good taste as a finely tuned mechanism for judgement. Paul Graham famously writes in his essay about good work that it is simple, timeless, solves the right problem, suggestive, symmetrical, resembles nature, daring, a redesign, and done in communities. Short of meeting each of these criteria individually, good taste is instead about identifying the pattern: the ability to navigate tension.

Good taste thrives on contradiction, rather than resolution. It is timeless yet reflective of its time, it speaks to culture without being mainstream, and it is an original imitation. By nature of being a delicate balance between one quality or another, swaying into neither fully, good taste is a skill to be honed. The practice of developing good taste — a thinning funnel, a tightrope, the discipline of stone stacking — also lives in tension. It is a practice of two distinct yet complementary ways of living: consuming deliberately and producing excessively.

Consume deliberately

If you were learning how to cook just 30-40 years ago, you would peruse books at a physical location. 10-20 years ago, you’d search for recipes online. Today, you only need to think about cooking before short-form content platforms push streams of unwarranted, and not necessarily unwanted, recipes your way. As digital touch points become more and more integrated with our lifestyles, the less we seek information proactively. Where information is disseminated so effectively and so gratuitously, consumption is at risk of becoming meaningless abundance.

But it’s more than simply combatting passivity: how many of your choices do you actually own? And how many of your choices belong to a greater network channeling all the fingerprints you have left in the digital world? When algorithms coalesce into recommending the same things — due to profitability, popularity, or controversy — it is becoming increasingly difficult to diverge from the mainstream. When the business of advertisement is so closely plugged into our thoughts and preferences, predicting our next engagement before we’re even aware, data becomes a control mechanism for our decisions. As popular chatbots begin launching advertising functions, the advent of AI is allowing platforms to learn more about you and push content more seamlessly.

Far from adopting a completely Luddite lifestyle, it’s perhaps more realistic to practice cognitive security, commonly used to mean protecting the mind against misinformation. I argue it is also the methodical practice of discerning if you own the information pipeline and the act of extracting significance and intention to content you consume.

An act of deliberate consumption effectively gives the brain training data on previous works of art, so that the next time you encounter something analogous, you’ve already begun developing thoughts and opinions. It trains the muscle for identifying good and relevant art; it trains taste-making.

Produce excessively

I wrote about how lifestyles designed around convenience have smoothened our lives, away from things that require effort. Downstream of this is the preference for consumption hobbies, or passive engagement with art and media (e.g., reading, watching T.V., going out to eat), over production hobbies, or active engagement that begets creation (e.g., writing, knitting, cooking). While deliberate consumption has the potential to be creative input, being actively involved in the production of something, especially art, is a more effective way of curating your taste because it exposes you to feedback.

I enjoyed this essay by artist Elliot Nathan (How to Make A Living) that mentions how finding your audience goes hand-in-hand with finding your style. Setting aside the equivalence that good taste is profitable art, I do agree that good taste goes beyond what simply speaks to your soul. It is also understanding what speaks to others; by extension, also allowing your art to reverberate with the cultural zeitgeist because if you “just make art that excites you…you eventually make work that resonates with people.”

In addition to experimenting with different styles, experimenting with derivative work is particularly salient: good work is rarely the first-of-a-kind. Instead, good work is constantly making iterative and additive Frankensteins of Good Work Past, especially exploratory, out-of-ordinary ones.

“It is only the unimaginative who ever invent. The true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes, and he annexes everything.” (Oscar Wilde)

It is also in this process of producing excessively that one can begin to better understand how to consume, not just out of self-preservation, but out of creative necessity.

Good taste is tension

Just as the definition of good taste resides in a tension — an art piece that is at once personal yet universal, one-of-a-kind yet familiar — so does the path of curating good taste.

The modern, unprecedented scale of accessible art and creation can be a beautiful thing; it allows us to understand what is possible, and get closer to what we truly like. It is discovery that not only feels limitless, but also prescient. Sometimes we tread closely to having too much of a good thing, a portent to choose balance and restraint.

Therein lies the tension that those with good taste understand how to navigate: consumption without production is passive, and production without deliberate consumption is wanting of context.

This year, I was infatuated with modernist literature and its in-depth exploration of the interior. The Sun Also Rises brings Hemingway’s “iceberg” technique at the forefront — flat writing that entrusts the reader in extracting rich expression under the surface. Woolf’s iconic stream of consciousness is dense in To the Lighthouse, where time is non-linear and plot takes a backseat in favor of delving into the complexity of each character’s subjective experience. Henry James’ Daisy Miller makes the most of storytelling through a biased and restricted POV, adding to the ambiguity and magnetism of the titular protagonist.

If modernist techniques frame the interior as the primary site of meaning, that interior becomes more charged when filtered through the woman’s perspective across history. Anna Karenina by Tolstoy is a dense psychological exercise on how societal norms and external judgement can invade the mind. Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence reaches toward a similar freedom (more on this later), while The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton are beautifully entertaining and serve their own moral reckoning. A book that surprised me this year was The Silent Woman by Janet Malcom, who meditates on the life of poet Sylvia Plath, but also the responsibility to truthfully yet artistically tell someone else’s story.

Science fiction is my favorite genre, but this year I leaned closer toward speculative fiction — centering humanistic debates before theorizing on scientific and technological progress. War of the Worlds was a taste of H. G. Wells’ lasting impact on invasion genre sci-fi, but also the foreboding analogy on the effect of total warfare. I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman mysteriously confines our protagonist in a cage with 40 other women, where her interiority becomes a survival mechanism. My wildcard read of the year was Fevre Dream by George R. R. Martin, who disguises a philosophical inquiry of complicity in his epic of vampires on Mississippi steamboats in 1850s Jim Crow era.

A few other books that don’t quite fit in any pattern except to relive the writing of past favorites that never disappoint include Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking, her detached precision in writing only adding to the feeling of experiencing insurmountable grief; Toni Morrison’s talent in exploring morality through complicated friendships in “Recitacif”; and a long-awaited prequel to the Hunger Games series that dominated my childhood, Suzanne Collins’ Sunrise on the Reaping.

I write mini-reviews of all books I’ve read on Goodreads; in the meantime, here are my top 3 of 26 books I’ve read in 2025, a combination of how much a book has entertained me, if I’ve learned something interesting from it, and how thoroughly the prose sank into my soul:

1. Tenth of December: Stories (2013) and A Swim in the Pond in the Rain (2021) by George Saunders

Genre: Tenth of December - Speculative fiction, Short stories; A Swim in the Pond in the Rain - Literary analysis, Nonfiction

Favorite quotes:

“It was that impossible thing: happiness that does not wilt to reveal the thin shoots of some new desire rising from within it.” - Tenth of December

“This feeling of fondness for the world takes the form, in [Chekhov’s] stories, of a constant state of reexamination.” - A Swim in the Pond in the Rain

“We don’t have to become an entirely new person to do better; our view just has to be readjusted, our natural energy turned in the right direction” - A Swim in the Pond in the Rain

Thoughts:

This year I picked up Saunders for the first time, and the two books I read instantly floated to the top of my favorites list, making it an impossible task to choose one over the other. The first, Tenth of December, is a collection of darkly clever short stories with sci-fi elements. Some stories are ordinary at first glance — struggles with money, mental illness, and trauma; others are experimental and odd — immigrant women being exploited as lawn ornaments, drugs that make you fall in hypomanic love or go on Medieval tirades. All share the use of humor to deal with serious topics and a constant window into characters’ inner monologues, creating uncomfortable yet deeply honest portrayals of life.

Saunders has one of the strongest voices in modern literature; his edgy yet effusive personality also comes through in the second book of his I picked up this year: A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, a guided reading of seven short stories of world-renowned Russian literature. As a writing professor, Saunders leads us through why select storytelling has persevered in literary canon for so long, covering Tolstoy, Chekhov, Turgenev, and Gogol. The later we get into the lesson, Saunders’ class-in-a-novel becomes less about writing and more about connection and life, which, in my opinion, is ultimately what good writing best captures.

2. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (1920)

Genre: Literary fiction

Favorite quote:

“Do you know - I hardly remembered you?… I mean: how shall I explain? I-it’s always so. Each time you happen to me all over again.”

Thoughts:

Wharton is another author who has charmed me thoroughly this year; as a wealthy, educated New York socialite during the Gilded Age (1870s), she has a piercing and stylish perspective on the societal constraints on even the most privileged women of her era. The Age of Innocence is the great American novel on the scandals, rituals, and undertones of a suffocating, high context culture.

If Anna Karenina is Russia’s Great Love Story, this novel is its American cousin — love stories constrained by reputation, social liability, and a suppression of authentic passion. I am enamored with the way Wharton writes about how love creeps up on you, how it’s brighter in memory, and how terrifying it can become when it threatens structures that make life legible. Ellen Olenska, the female protagonist, is endlessly compelling throughout the novel — an enigmatic, tortured, and worldly character that embodies “what could’ve been.”

3. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin (1969)

Genre: Speculative fiction

Favorite quote:

“It is a terrible thing, this kindness that human beings do not lose. Terrible, because when we are finally naked in the dark and cold, it is all we have. We who are so rich, so full of strength, we end up with that small change. We have nothing else to give.”

Thoughts:

Le Guin is masterful at plunging you into the depths of a frozen alien world “Winter” where the inhabitants are ambisexual (i.e., shifting genders on a monthly cycle) through the eyes of a human ambassador. The absence of sexual dimorphism is a riveting thought experiment; it exposes how gendered expectations shape power, intimacy, and even language. How does society reorganize itself when gender becomes a fluid construct? What is the moral labor we must undergo to better understand one another?

It is no surprise Le Guin has cemented herself as one of the most influential science fiction authors by contributing not just humanistic, grounded prose but also through raising philosophical questions about remains when every other identifier falls away — a fragile kindness.

Honorable Mentions:

“Yes, I need you, my fairy-tale. Because you are the only person I can talk with about the shade of a cloud, about the song of a thought — and about how, when I went out to work today and looked a tall sunflower in the face, it smiled at me with all of its seeds.”

Vladimir Nabokov, Letters to Véra

“Now I was trying only to reconstruct the collision, the collapse of the dead star.”

Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“The mood of efficiency, of checking things off the list as you tear through a days shopping, washing, cleaning, mending and so forth, is totally destructive of the slightly bored melancholy which nurtures my imagination.”

Janet Malcom, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

“It is awfully easy to be hard boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.”

Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“… grief and this joy were equally outside all ordinary circumstances of life, were like holes in this ordinary life, through which something higher showed.”

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“It was love…love that never attempted to clutch its object; but, like the love which mathematicians bear their symbols, or poets their phrases, was meant to be spread over the world and become part of the human gain.”

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“But isn’t this how souls come together, by holding another’s every idea to be true and making it their own?”

Sabahattin Ali, Madonna in a Fur Coat

Special shoutout to the book club that has accompanied many of these reads and happy holidays!

Active bonding requires creating memories: net new experiences together. From the clashing of psyches in a round of Secret Hitler to the physical dramas of spike ball, engaging in play sparks a unique form of connection, it is bonding from dynamic creation.

We may not be able to play minigolf all the time, but seeing every opportunity to socialize as an opportunity to play — through a running joke, a soft jab, a moment of pretend — opens a window to connection without expectation. It becomes an additive step in the relationship rather than an iterative one. Just recently, the New York Times wrote: “the strongest bonds come less from existing similarly and more from riffing playfully. In these moments, people create a little world that belongs just to them…building a shared reality”.

Not only is play co-creation, it is an exercise in neuroplasticity, testing the flexibility and quickness needed to respond to spontaneous stimuli. Nietzsche talks of the final spiritual transformation of the soul: “Innocence is the child, and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a game, a self-rolling wheel, a first movement, a holy Yea.” The child represents the freedom of play, its affirmation of life, and the creation of new values unbound by neither norms nor norm-rejection. Verbal play is the first push in a self rolling wheel.

Socializing can be cerebral — you can run the calculations and weigh the merits of each chess move — or it can be a happily futile game of Jenga. Good banter, banter that flows seamlessly, is a melding of minds — one brain saying to another through the narrow confines of spoken language — I understand you, so that I can add to you. Let me extract a block and place it upon yours, so delicately balanced, and then you will do the same, piling on top of one another so that eventually we have created something much taller than the initial stack, yet imperfect and pointless all the while.

Maybe not pointless; after all, our tower has never been grander, we have learned more about how the pieces fit together, we have delighted in the motions of moving toward a conclusion we all saw coming. Above all, the beauty of play is being unmarried to the result.

In the suspension of utility of playful socialization — of knowing the Jenga tower will eventually fall — we become looser. “It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative..it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self,” psychologist Donald Winnicott pinpoints the role of authenticity as a critical reason play is so important for relationships. A good bit, in its unassuming bid for a better understanding of each others’ true self, adds new tendons to the muscle of the relationship.

It says “this will all come crashing down, and wasn’t it such fun?”

But the fire Martín paints is intentionally set, in fact, depicting a celebration of the San Juan1 Festival in late June — flames fed by old furniture, unwanted objects, and wishes. People jump over the lick of flames, bathe in the sea, and partake in music and dance around the bonfire. The custom originates from and is also widely celebrated in Spain, believed to have pagan roots in honoring the sun and warding off evil; it is an act of spiritual renewal.

The word “bonfire” intuitively signals “good fire”, but actually originates from the medieval term “a fire of bones” from Celtic festivals in which animal bones were burned in a symbolic sacrifice to ward off evil spirits. Since the Middle Ages, and likely before the existence of written language, transformational worship has been tied to immolation.

The human occupation with bonfires is pervasive. A key proponent of a Chinese funeral2 is the burning of paper money (joss), one of many offerings made at the graves of ancestors. In addition to joss, paper recreations of all things one may need in the afterlife — cars, buildings, even paper smartphones — are ceremoniously tossed into a bonfire at the site of burial.

The beginnings of the fire are stoked first by joss paper, fed one by one then in stacks, until the flames are large enough to devour the larger fixtures — shiny recreations so brightly colored they nearly feel out of place at a site of grieving. An elaborate feast of tea and baijiu3, of the best-looking fruit and traditional snacks, is also laid out; after the paper menagerie is burned, family members gather to carve the sweetest part of dragon fruit or crumble pieces of decorated pastry into the fire, passing them to the afterlife — along with beloved belongings, such as paintbrushes and oft-worn clothing. In the final act, white funeral robes are burned in purification of the bereaved.

In both the San Juan festival and in Chinese funerals, in celebration and in grief, people start bonfires for another entity — as sacrifice for pagan spirits or in honor of a passed relative, it is expressly done in service of another. But it is also for those who set the fires and need to see a thing of beauty, of discomfort, of fury and destruction, to feel true change in phoenix fashion — true rebirth.

Are we better able to understand a loved one is gone when we see the fruit char, the paper shrivel? Even as heat seeps into the skin — a warmth of acceptance and finality, or perhaps, of community and persisting love — it is kept bittersweet by the stinging in the eyes, the closing of the throat. Smoke reminds the fire-setter that this warmth comes not without sacrifice, not without some destruction.

In Martín’s painting, the little figures have their heads cowed, their silhouettes outlined by a halo of firelight. It is at once a grand affair and a solemn one. Some Promethean instinct compels us to contain the power of destruction in an ethereal sigil. It asks of us to transmute sacrifice into purifying creation.

In my family’s region, smaller “bonfires” are set in the days following the funeral along the coast of the Yellow River: torn bun pieces steamed in a metal spoon, red wax candles lit up and erected into the sand. Each time, the sight of a flame is mesmerizing; fire takes on a quality unlike any color or dimension. It lacks the hard edges of our tangible world, and against the pitch black of night, aches to look at directly. Yet, it’s impossible to look away, to mutter anything but prayer over the wind-muffled cry of burning.

The effect is otherworldly — we get to our knees and touch our foreheads to the coarse ground, for these motions are spiritual release. These bonfires are worship.

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These conversations are few and far between. Most of the time, my schedule is frictionless; my habits, like those of most Americans, are built around convenience rather than touch points with people living around me. Here and there, a (usually older) stranger will ask me for directions, but largely, we use our smartphone GPS to get around, to order takeout, to entertain ourselves.

Maybe things shouldn’t be so easy. For one, we no longer rely on regular interaction with the people living around us for favors; as a result, we are rarely occupied impractically. For another, this “lifestyle creep” toward convenience has only been accelerated by the shadow of AI — in daily life and in work, but perhaps most controversially — how it is used to reproduce, replicate, and replace human-made art.

Impractical conversations

Traditional social contract theory suggests that individuals consent to surrender some freedoms and control in exchange for social benefits. But today, as we move to both A) paid and B) digitally mediated relationships, community-based trust shifts into something more convenient and something more detached.

Derek Thompson writes in The Atlantic about the tax of isolating ourselves downstream of everyday conveniences. While being phone-bound and home-bound has solidified our closest connections and even our outer ring of “tribe” through shared affinities, this shift has wreaked havoc on our middle ring — the “familiar, but not intimate” interactions with people physically around us that teach us tolerance. Thompson points to this erosion as a cause for increased political polarization, but it also belies a distinct interpersonal loss.

I am nostalgic for the human element. It is simultaneously stimulating and grounding to exchange pleasantries with a stranger, for example, to exchange acknowledgement for each other’s existence. More so, there is an unknown benefit from the experiences, insights, and opportunities from people you meet impractically. The typical collisions in my daily life are limited; rarely do I meet someone who knows how to arrange the right coverage for opening a cocktail bar in New York or who can list off all the concoctions on their holiday menu, someone with a lingering finger on the pulse of bar patronage.

Some of the most well-connected people I know are masters at eliciting and responding to impractical bids for connection, and with amusement, not duty — fulfill. In many ways, this form of effort is a practice in love for the craft.

Impractical artwork

“Love for the craft” approach, of course, embodies the ask of traditional creative disciplines. This parallel is particularly relevant when considering the push for AI-produced content being presented as artwork (recently, for example, Sam Altman boasted about a new OpenAI model that is “very good at creative writing”). Unexpectedly, LLM models seem to show a proficiency for all creative tasks — from a flood of AI-generated pictures and videos on social media to AI-written books listed on Amazon — there is undeniably a temptation to replace the arduous yet satisfying process that is artistic expression.

A common argument against the legitimacy of AI-produced artwork is the lack of innovation and originality; another is that the artist is simply not human. Taking a slightly different approach, Ted Chiang, renowned sci-fi writer, argues in The New Yorker that AI-produced art “treats us as less than what we are: creators and apprehenders of meaning.” Specifically, Chiang asserts that writing, and all other forms of creative expression, is a series of making choices, one after the other. Similar to striking up an unnecessary conversation, it is a practice that is pro-friction and anti-convenience — an impractical expression. Yet, outsourcing those choices destroys the core of expression.

We all put effort into relationships we value, hobbies we are passionate about, and creation we believe is worth it. Most people are inherently good at investing effort, even in a time where effort is easily bought out. Maybe, yes, laziness is at play. But I argue that convenience has gutted, not effort, but vulnerability.

There is a raw underbelly to investing time and intention into people, into creation, and it is terrifying to do so without guaranteed return. What if the interesting stranger responds curtly? What if the art you have so painstakingly created does not receive adoration?

The simple act of stepping outside your apartment, or of calling what you create “art”, braces the brush of perception from the rest of the world. Even if you overcome the inertia, impractical expression stings from the rub of social friction, a deeply vulnerable act. And maybe we invite the aches that come with a bit of strain, all for the love of the craft.

There is nothing more exciting than exploring my favorite genre (sci-fi) in experimental forms: The Complete Cosmicomics is a collection of Italo Calvino’s short stories, each a fantastical, dreamy tale devised around a scientific theory. The Employees by Olga Ravn asks us to read between the lines to piece together the unsettling narrative on a futuristic spaceship solely through workplace statements and interviews. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut uses time travel to explore PTSD in his sarcastic, dark anti-war book.

Continuing the theme of innovative literature, I picked up Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, which cleverly combines lovely, fictional poetry with meta commentary. I ventured to New Journalism pioneers — Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem — and loved their distinctly American voices and immersive storytelling.

This year also featured multiple meditations on bodily autonomy. One of the most life-changing, universal questions is the choice to have children — Still Born by Guadalupe Nettel ponders voluntary childlessness while Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami narrows on the physical and mental realities of motherhood. Elena Knows by Claudia Piñeiro and A Very Easy Death by Simone De Beauvoir were heartbreaking novellas on the cruelty of terminal illness, the bureaucracy that follows, and the strain of caretaking.

Cross-cultural themes were also common and beloved this year: Babel by R.F. Kuang was a fantastical epic about colonial power and translation, The Secret of Laughter by Shusha Guppy is a charming collection of Persian folktales, The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini is backdropped by a turbulent Afghanistan, and 12 of 27 books I read this year were translated literature.

I write reviews for all the books I’ve read on Goodreads; in the meantime, here are my top 3 of 2024, a choice I’ve arbitrarily decided is some combination of how much a book has entertained me, if I’ve learned something interesting from it, and how thoroughly the prose sank into my soul:

1. The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu

Genre: Science fiction, Fantasy, Short stories

Favorite quote:

“We are different, you and I, and the qualia of our consciousnesses are as divergent as two stars at the ends of the universe. And yet, whatever has been lost in translation in the long journey of my thoughts through the maze of civilization to your mind, I think you do understand me, and you think you do understand me. Our minds managed to touch, if but briefly and imperfectly. Does that thought not make the universe seem just a bit kinder, a bit brighter, a bit warmer and more human?”

Thoughts:

This collection has captivated my mind and heart this year. Liu creates moving, meaningful stories by blending the surreal — whether that’s animated origami figures or immortality — with the very real folktales, history, and culture of East Asia. The distinct worlds he creates in each story are vibrant and fun, yet prod at thought-provoking concepts.

For example, “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary” is about the creation of a particle machine that allows a snapshot of history to be viewed by an individual — but only once — and it questions how while narrative makes history more impactful to our story-loving species, does it dilute the larger, objective picture? Another one of my favorites, “A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel”, is an alternate history of an underground tunnel built in the 20th century connecting Japan and America, and it delves into the human cost of progress, the moral value of change.

2. The Red Tent by Anita Diamant

Genre: Biblical history, Historical fiction

Favorite quote:

“If you want to understand any woman you must first ask about her mother and then listen carefully…The more a daughter knows about the details of her mother's life - without flinching or whining - the stronger the daughter.”

Thoughts:

I picked up this book out of desire to correct my complete ignorance of biblical history, but I truly enjoyed this re-telling from the perspective of Dinah, daughter of Jacob and Leah in the Old Testament, whose only mention in the Bible is a footnote about her rape by the prince of Shechem. Through Dinah’s eyes, we’re better able to visualize the social structures and norms of the time while relating to themes that transcend — the rhythm of life and inexplicability of loss.

This book isn’t really about religion. It’s about coming-of-age as a girl in an ancient world, of the powerful rituals that arise from sisterhood and motherhood. Diamant does not shy away from topics like desire and menstruation in depicting this gritty, intimate reality, and her brazen style absolutely fascinates me.

3. Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

Genre: Essays, Journalism, Creative nonfiction

Favorite quote:

“But our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable ‘I’”

Thoughts:

I admit it’s taken a while for me to get to Didion’s work only because her popularity has set my expectations so high, but this collection has not disappointed. The first section “Life Styles in the Golden Land” includes features on popular figures and movements of 1960s California like the hippie counterculture in San Francisco, the final “Seven Places of the Mind” is a smattering of essays on meaningful locations — New York City, Alcatraz.

My favorite, however, is the second section, “Personals,” and what I believe encapsulates what I like so much about her writing. Didion’s philosophy is an extension of Anne Lammott’s (Bird by Bird), that writing comes from flavors of observation, and thus, should always be self-centered. This approach, combined with her journalistic vision, translates into immersive and humanistic storytelling that makes me tingle with aspiration.

Honorable Mentions:

“I play the game, in other words, the game of pretending there’s an order in the dust, a regularity in the system, or an interpretation of different systems, incongruous but still measurable, so that every graininess of disorder coincides with the faceting of an order which promptly crumbles.”

Italo Calvino, The Complete Cosmicomics

“She paid attention, the kind of attention that almost didn’t exist anymore. This was her gift. So few people did this for each other. Giving someone your attention — with the greatest amount of care she could muster in whatever allotted time period — was far more precious than any kind of commodity.”

Min Jin Lee, Free Food for Millionaires

“I told myself that I should never sit in the lobby again, never pick up the white telephone, never make the journey any more: I should so happily have broken with those habits if Maman had been cured, but I still had a nostalgia for them, since it was in losing her that I lost them.”

Simone De Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death

“Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.”

Toni Morrison, Beloved

“And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.”

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“Translation means doing violence upon the original, it means warping and distorting it for foreign, unintended eyes. So, where does that leave us? How can we conclude except by acknowledging that an act of translation is always an act of betrayal?”

R.F. Kuang, Babel

“…they had heaps of theories, always theories, as young people have. It was to explain the feeling they had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people; not being known.”

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

Happy holidays!

We drove down a foggy, perilous loop to Fajã Dos Vimes and parked in the dirt lot facing the Atlantic Ocean, a sight that warred with the smell of manure and gloom of spring. Unassuming in its traditional Azorean design — whitewashed walls with volcanic stone accents, red-tiled Mediterranean roof — Café Nunes is dark and empty during the trough of tourist season. Ringing the bell at the front summons a bustling middle-aged woman, the bar matron and your mother; the lights flickered on and revealed walls plastered with a menagerie of foreign currency, signed by the hundreds of tourists that came before us. 

Upon downing a cappuccino, we followed your mother to see what Café Nunes is famous for — the 500+ coffee plants that supply the café, before they have been plucked, dried, manually ground, and roasted in small batches. As we walk past multiple vegetable plants, a chicken coop, and various roaming animals and family members, it dawns on me that we’re headed to the rows of thick shrubs that stretch into the mountain above. It’s hard to reconcile what they are at first, round green nubs blending into the leaves, but noticing one materializes millions of other maturing beans, some already flushing with ripeness.

Your mother then took us into her loom room, where she sold handwoven bags and quilted bedspreads, a texture unique to the island. That’s where we met you, a thin, elegant woman speaking fluent English, and daughter of the Nunes family. You helped out with the café business when you could, but had left to mainland Portugal for your college years. You moved back to São Jorge to be with your childhood sweetheart, startled by the reverse culture shock and amused by the stickiness of tradition here. Most businesses here, for example, never attempted to adopt credit card payments. In a society fermenting in decades of tradition with little inflow and massive outflow, change moves at an agonizing rate. Is that why you left? 

You were so curious about our American backgrounds — your cousins who grew up in the States live faster, wildly different lives than yours. But they don’t speak Portuguese. You understood America was a melting pot, a place where one can’t help but melt into. And while you laughed at the doggedness of the local Azoreans, there is no doubt familiarity, comfort, and duty in returning. Here, all secrets were publicly traded stories, but people trusted each other. Is that why you returned? 

You now run your own hiking business, in the spirit of travel entrepreneurism that permeates the family, the island, and its unique fajãs — coastal plateaus formed from lava flows and landslides. Centuries of natural disasters — earthquakes, floods, and volcano eruptions — caused mass emigration but, still, villages sprang up on the fajãs. People realized the volcanic debris created fertile soil ideal for planting staples like coffee, yams, and maize, while the distinctive scenery began to attract visitors in swarms. It may take centuries, but the Azores islands evolved in their own quiet way, one that moves in harmony with the direction the fog drifts and the trees sway.

You’ve gazed across the ocean only to turn back; you speak in your mother tongue that is still your major tongue. You’ve married your childhood sweetheart, and you’ve inherited your childhood business. Though tempted by other winds, you chose known soils, where clear blue waves gently lap into fajãs, smooth and flat as poured batter. Perhaps because you sense that, over centuries to come, those waves will also carve grand arches into the volcanic cliffs of São Jorge.

My inspiration for this series, Letters to Strangers, comes from the compilation of the same name by Colleen Kinder. She writes: 

“We spend so much of our lives in the company of people whose names we’ll never know, people we’ll never meet again. How rarely we honor them. How rarely we admit to ourselves the strange, unannounced ways they can lodge inside of us. 

These essays don’t say, I knew you. They say, I never really knew you. They confess their own partial gazes. They open up territories we didn’t know we had inside of us. They offer themselves as vessels for our least official ghosts.”

Memory is imperfect, romantic, and often a reflection of ourselves. Writing letters to strangers allows me to embrace this semi-reality. 

You’re native to New York, narrowly escaping the draft as a young teacher in the South Bronx. But your true calling — when not occupied by women — began with bronze art commissions for conference rooms of executives you generally despised, but who gave great “financial advice”. You lowered your voice, then, to tell us about how 20 grand in savings tripled the first week you bet it on IBM’s first computer. Over the decades, your art installations blend multiple mediums — inlaying large photographs of portraits or cast metal with the textures of its urban environment, changing the experience of pedestrian spaces. 

The art projects got larger; on East 41st Street in front of the New York Public Library, you sculpted 100 unique plaques displaying famous quotes in literary history. One plaque stands out — “the world is made of stories, not atoms (Muriel Rukeyser)”. I’m not surprised this quote made your selection.

You tell stories to strangers you meet in your neighborhood bar — of nearly getting arrested during your time coaching as a pickup artist, of being catfished on a dating app, of your affair with a married woman. To anyone who will listen, even the simplest question will trigger an eccentric tale, only to follow with a self-aware “ah, I’m rambling again.” You now spend most days in your studio in the LES telling stories, testing one more medium, the podcast. From “Drug Dealing with Dad” to “Me And Kissinger,” snippets of your life and others’ have become immortalized. 

25 years after the Library Walk plaques were installed, duller now after bearing the footsteps of millions of New Yorkers, you say in an interview: “Getting someone hurtling along to stop in their tracks is real success.” In a city full of people bustling along like atoms, skeptical of anything that would break their course, you and your stories are a suspension of buzzing curiosity. You’re a fragment of the creative soul pulsing behind decades of artistic outflow in New York, part of the magnetic force that continues to pull stories from pavement. 

Stories, that like atoms, are never truly created or destroyed, but rather mesh into every moment, waiting to take form — sometimes in that of tortoise shell glasses, wielding a pocketful of business cards and a glass of ginger ale. 

My inspiration for this series, Letters to Strangers, comes from the compilation of the same name by Colleen Kinder. She writes: 

“We spend so much of our lives in the company of people whose names we’ll never know, people we’ll never meet again. How rarely we honor them. How rarely we admit to ourselves the strange, unannounced ways they can lodge inside of us. 

These essays don’t say, I knew you. They say, I never really knew you. They confess their own partial gazes. They open up territories we didn’t know we had inside of us. They offer themselves as vessels for our least official ghosts.”

Memory is imperfect, romantic, and often a reflection of ourselves. Writing letters to strangers allows me to embrace this semi-reality. 

The flight attendant asks you — a stoic, elderly Chinese woman. It’s late, even for plane time, but this jerks my attention. You reply in Spanish, and I’m brimming with questions: why does this flight attendant, en route from Italy to Hong Kong, default to Spanish when talking to you? 

But you’re the first to strike up a conversation — blankly asking if I’m “japonesa”. Your mother tongue is Cantonese, and my mother tongue is English, but we manage with our thin linguistic overlap of Mandarin, clumsily repeating phrases and simplifying ideas to piece together each other’s stories. Since immigrating from Guangzhou to Peru 16 years ago, you’ve established five Chinese restaurants across the country. You say this matter-of-factly, your weathered face unsmiling, as if there is no other world in which you don’t become a self-made restaurant tycoon. Though your children and grandchildren all live in Peru now, you’re on your way to visit the few family members still living in southern China. 

The contents of high school Spanish class float to the surface of my mind, and I remember learning about Chifa, Chinese-Peruvian cuisine, a name derived from the Chinese word “chi fan” or “to eat.” In the mid-19th century, Chinese laborers who had immigrated to Peru wanted to replicate dishes from home but lacked authentic ingredients, substituting them with local foods. The cultural exchange flows both ways — much of modern-day Peruvian cooking has adopted imports from Chinese immigrants (e.g., lomo saltado, a wok stir-fry with soy sauce). The Chinese population found its niche in the restaurant industry, and Chifa became one of the most popular types of food in Peru. 

I immediately tried to jot down the names of your restaurants, but you struggled with the pinyin function on my phone. I settled for only a few phonetics I hoped to search for later.

I was in awe of your accomplishments, and by how easy you made them seem, but you had your share of quirks. When you grew weary of watching a nondescript J-Lo movie with no audio and no subtitles, you patrolled the aisles around us, making sure no one had their seat reclined on our cramped, red-eye flight. The tall Italian man seated diagonally from you sought sleep by reclining his seat, but you, unperturbed, reached over and clicked his seat's button, roughly nudging it back to its upright position. 

How odd it was to see you, a menacing presence just barely over five feet, carving your own rules into stone tablets and enforcing them with an iron fist. Is this how you, hardened by the trials and tribulations of building your empire, shouldered your way into the restaurant business? Or, perhaps, am I giving you too much credit, and the power has gone to your head? The only thing I was certain about was your kindness to me, insisting that I wear a jacket over my blanket in the pushy way of a Chinese mother, affection conveyed through demand.

Chinese emigrants rarely preserve their traditional first names and give their children the cultural names of the country they’ve immigrated to — prominent Chinese-Peruvian figures include Julio, Felipe, and Magdalena. In Italy, children are named Valentina, Angelo, Alessandro. The imperative to adapt is woven into the DNA of an immigrant, and you’re no different. In your two decades in Peru, you’ve learned Spanish, Limeño culture, and spread your financial and familial roots. When the flight attendant realized you didn’t speak English, she tried again in Spanish. 

But you felt that Peru was perhaps not as welcoming; with no access to senior care for non-citizens, survival was self-determined. When forsaken by a country you call home, even the monolith of your character wavered. And I wonder, is your self-assurance the cause of your success or a byproduct?

I have no doubt you’re doing well for yourself, though. I asked you, was it tough to manage five restaurants across the country? 

You replied — “No, I’m the top dog. Everyone does the work for me.” 

My inspiration for this series, Letters to Strangers, comes from the compilation of the same name by Colleen Kinder. She writes: 

“We spend so much of our lives in the company of people whose names we’ll never know, people we’ll never meet again. How rarely we honor them. How rarely we admit to ourselves the strange, unannounced ways they can lodge inside of us. 

These essays don’t say, I knew you. They say, I never really knew you. They confess their own partial gazes. They open up territories we didn’t know we had inside of us. They offer themselves as vessels for our least official ghosts.”

Memory is imperfect, romantic, and often a reflection of ourselves. Writing letters to strangers allows me to embrace this semi-reality. 

In celebration of a personal tradition (2022 here) and an obsessive need to catalog everything I consume, here are my top 5 books of 2023, in no particular order — 

1. Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller

Genre: Nonfiction, Science, History, Psychology, Philosophy, Auto/Biography… etc. 

Favorite quote:

“I have come to believe that it is our life's work to tear down this order, to keep tugging at it, trying to unravel it, to set free the organisms trapped underneath. That it is our life's work to mistrust our measures. Especially those about moral and mental standing. To remember that behind every ruler there is a Ruler. To remember that a category is at best a proxy; at worst, a shackle.”

Thoughts:

This book tops my list of greatest of all time reads because of the sheer literary real estate it covers without feeling ambitious. It’s a peculiar tale of an obsessive taxonomist who happens to be responsible for bringing eugenics to America, but it’s also Miller’s mechanism to explore happiness, meaning, and her personal journey with loss. It’s a collection of interesting tidbits on psychology and evolution, but it’s also a revolution against order, a reminder to embrace both the boons and banes of chaos. Miller writes with a quirkiness and scientific expertise that translates well into the themes of the book — if fish don't exist, what does that mean for us? If I had to indiscriminately recommend only a single book on this list, simply because at least one element about this book would resonate, it would be this one. 

2. The Woman Destroyed by Simone De Beauvoir

Genre: Fiction, Short story, The Female Experience

Favorite quote:

“Reflections, echoes, reverberating back and back to infinity: I have discovered the pleasure of having a long past behind me. I have not the leisure to tell it over to myself, but often, quite unexpectedly, I catch sight of it, a background to the diaphanous present; a background that gives it its color and its light, just as rocks or sand show through the shifting brilliance of the sea. Once I used to cherish schemes and promises for the future; now my feelings and my joys are smoothed and softened with the shadowy velvet of time past.”

Thoughts:

A pleasant departure from the heavily theoretical 1949 feminist scripture of The Second Sex, De Beauvoir also excels at imbuing a range of emotions in her collection of three fictional novellas: a melancholic meditation on aging, the devastating aftermath of a child’s death, and the building resentment in the face of infidelity. Through experiences both ubiquitous and (fortunately) niche, De Beauvoir’s inexplicable ability to build empathy for her vivid characters demonstrates a true and complex understanding of human nature. This collection specifically shines a light on the female experience through three different writing forms — prose, stream of consciousness, and journal entry. Other than her lyrical writing, the common thread amongst these stories is the profound, passionate inner workings of a woman lamenting, raging, and despairing. 

3. Another Country by James Baldwin

Genre: Fiction, The Bisexual Experience

Favorite quote:

“[New York] seemed to have no sense of whatever of the exigencies of human life; it was so familiar and so public that it became, at last, the most despairingly private of cities. One was continually being jostled, yet longed, at the same time, for the sense of others, for a human touch; and if one was never — it was the general complaint — left alone in New York, one had, still, to fight very hard in order not to perish of loneliness.”

Thoughts:

Without leaving a single element of love and life untouched, Baldwin details two loosely intertwined stories in New York and Paris that center queer relationships and interracial dynamics of the 1950s. Baldwin’s tangible curation of experience living in these two cities is uniquely beautiful, his writing persistently stylish, making this the hardest novel to choose a best quote from. In addition to an insightful general outlook, Baldwin explores intimate topics such as love and identity with heart-wrenching clarity and unparalleled talent. Perhaps most impressively, Baldwin’s shameless examination of topics considered taboo at time of publication has deservedly catapulted his work as an iconic contemporary author and activist. 

4. Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong 

Genre: Nonfiction, Essays, Autobiography

Favorite quote:

“We keep our heads down and work hard, believing that our diligence will reward us with our dignity, but our diligence will only make us disappear. By not speaking up, we perpetuate the myth that our shame is caused by our repressive culture and the country we fled, whereas America has given us nothing but opportunity. The lie that Asians have it good is so insidious that even now as I write, I’m shadowed by doubt that I didn’t have it bad compared to others. But racial trauma is not a competitive sport. The problem is not that my childhood was exceptionally traumatic but that it was in fact rather typical. Most white Americans can only understand racial trauma as a spectacle.”

Thoughts:

As one of the most impactful books I’ve read this year, Minor Feelings is an intimate, brutally honest, and historical exploration of the Asian American racial identity accomplished through mini narrative studies of well-known figures (Yuri Kochiyama, Theresa Cha), while weaving in Hong’s personal experiences. Race is so involuted that thinking about it is a heavy, weary task; to this effect, Hong does a brilliant job at acknowledging the complexity of racial dynamics in America while bringing devastating clarity into the conversation. For example, Hong rebels against the singular, market-tested “ethnic story” and fights for the expression and acknowledgement of minor feelings: “the sediment of everyday racial experience.” Regardless, her eloquence never comes at the expense of thoroughness — managing simultaneously to challenge and validate my prior views.

5. Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder

Genre: Philosophy, Fiction

Favorite quote:

“Life is both sad and solemn. We are led into a wonderful world, we meet one another here, greet each other — and wander together for a brief moment. Then we lose each other and disappear as suddenly and unreasonably as we arrived.”

Thoughts:

The entire history of western philosophy is nested within a whimsical adventure that Sophie, a 15-year-old Norwegian girl, embarks on when she begins receiving a series of mysterious letters. While the plot alone left me wanting, it serves as the perfect apparatus for an educational, breadth-over-depth, yet brightly intriguing book worth rereading. The narrative style not only contextualizes dense subjects — from ancient Greek philosophy to Marx’s manifesto — it also naturally compares and contrasts the various periods, philosophers, and modes of thought through dialogue. I went into this book expecting to begrudgingly Learn Something, but I came out of it delightfully surprised by how much it was a joy to (albeit slowly) digest its contents.

Honorable Mentions:

“Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.” 

Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle 

“It seemed to me—articulated in words of today—that not only did she know how to put things well but she was developing a gift that I was already familiar with… she took the facts and in a natural way charged them with tension; she intensified reality as she reduced it to words, she injected it with energy.”

Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend 

“Because each had discovered years before that they were neither white nor male, and that all freedom and triumph was forbidden to them, they had set about creating something else to be.”

Toni Morrison, Sula

“A boy, at best, can adore his mother, but a girl can understand her. When the doctor told me it was a girl, I thought, Now I will be understood. That was my happiest moment. The idea of a daughter.”

Ling Ma, Bliss Montage 

“Works of art are infinitely lonely, and no approach to them is as useless as criticism. Only love can grasp them, and hold them, and so be fair to them.”

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act—truth is always subversive.”

Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird 

“And isn’t that how you become tender, vulnerable? The tissue-softening marination of your own mind, the quicksand of mental indulgence?”

Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties

“Manuscripts don’t burn.” 

Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita 

Happy Holidays! :)

The one closest to me, KK, had quite literally anything you could ever need — suitcases, fake leaves, cowboy hats — I go there so often they probably recognize me by now. But this time, I wander into your shop further down Viale Bligny looking for string lights for my apartment’s mini Christmas tree. Miscellaneous objects lining the shelves blur together in their vastness, so I scan around for employees, likely your family members, ready to begin an interaction in Italian. You, a thin aging man with a slight bent in your back, take one glance at me, smile kindly, and ask, “Do you speak Chinese?”

I’m Chinese-American, yet I'm always shy to speak Chinese here, afraid some hesitation or tone in my speech would signal that I’m an outsider. I may be essentially unable to speak Italian too, but at least that’s something I’m not expected to be good at. 

But you see through me, so I stammer an affirmation and explain what I’m looking for. Within seconds, you bring the string lights to the checkout counter. Without asking, you silently open the container, unhook, and rip open a new pack of triple-A batteries to install them. Seeing as I completely forgot about batteries, I’m thankful you’re so proactive on my behalf. We don’t talk again but to say goodbye. As I walk out, I glance down at the receipt and notice you never charged me for the batteries. Over what is roughly a three euro difference, I am overcome with sentiment.

I was always fascinated by the Chinese enclave that had formed in Milan and endlessly interrogated my Chinese-Italian friends about their entrepreneurial backgrounds, their casual mastery of three languages, and the most authentic restaurants to patronize. Above all, they (and you) made me feel like I was home again, like there were people out there who were so different from me in some ways, but so indisputably familiar as Chinese people in the Western world. While I’m coddled by (endlessly grateful for) the Asian diaspora in the US, you exist here as a distinct minority group. You probably moved here later in life like most of the older Chinese population, a first-generation immigrant in the search of a better life. 

Your grandchildren are probably one of the only people of color in their classes. Your children may have trouble finding corporate jobs that will accept them, even if they received the education you didn’t. You’re facing racist comments, unwarranted looks, and the challenges of appearing like an outsider in Italy — all while running a fast-paced, demanding business that likely consumes your family’s lives. 

Maybe you simply forget to charge me. But maybe you look at me, you insist we speak Chinese, and you do me a small favor. You make me feel seen at an unknown, smaller price. I never got to thank you for it. 

My inspiration for Letters to Strangers comes from the compilation of the same name by Colleen Kinder, who writes: 

“We spend so much of our lives in the company of people whose names we’ll never know, people we’ll never meet again. How rarely we honor them. How rarely we admit to ourselves the strange, unannounced ways they can lodge inside of us. 

These essays don’t say, I knew you. They say, I never really knew you. They confess their own partial gazes. They open up territories we didn’t know we had inside of us. They offer themselves as vessels for our least official ghosts.”

Memory is imperfect, romantic, and often a reflection of ourselves. Writing letters to strangers allows me to embrace this semi-reality. 

I remember your voice occupying the bus as it bumped along the winding cliffs for hours, though I couldn’t remember anything you said. I was focused on keeping my debilitating motion-sickness at bay, fixedly staring out the window while absentmindedly listening to my friends talk about Ed Sheeran. But I’d notice when the bus would stop at a viewpoint; when you’d step out, heavy-footed as if carrying the world on your shoulders and light up a cigarette — the larger-than-life tour guide persona shrinking back into that of a more tangible man. 

Though cornered away and uninterested in small talk during one of these breaks, you noticed our offensively green beanies with felt horns stuck on the sides and “IRELAND” splashed across. Of course, that, along with everything about us, screamed American, an obvious target for your mordant teasing. You probably get a lot of Americans on your tours, seeing as it’s one of the cheapest ways to get to the cliffs. Do you enjoy the exposure to a wide variety of people, or does it perhaps overwhelm you with so much unpredicted behavior?

The day is a post-Brexit glumness, and the clouds hang low, but the whip of fresh air is undeniable. I can’t put my finger on it, but it seems like you’ve been doing this for a while. The ocean is probably a familiar sight for you, rocks slick with salt becoming a stable safe haven for those who survived the winding path up. By now, you must know the minutes between each stop; the sickening rhythm the bus jolts to must feel familiar. And you must know the people, their shops, and their goats; know where to stop for an authentic meal and the best spot for a pint and a view. Do you get tired of knowing repetitively?

The cliffs must never get old for you, though. When we finally make it to the Cliffs of Moher, I feel like I’m in Dear Esther, the video game epitome of a hauntingly majestic, oddly nostalgic Gaelic countryside. The zombie weather adds to the effect — flat cliff sides blanketed in green jutting into gray-blue water. In pictures, the cliffs seem as if they should be quiet, peaceful, picturesque, but my memory is inundated with crashing waves and shrieking winds. I remember it being only late September, but already needing to be wrapped away from the nipping chill.

You probably have more sophisticated feelings than me, a more holistic and nuanced view than what I pieced together in a few hours. But I think we’d both would agree this sight is one of the world’s greatest offerings, and maybe that’s why you choose to ride the same Leprechaun-themed bus everyday, regurgitate the same introductions, and face head-on the unknown of what brazen accessories your next group of tourists may don. 

I heard Mr. Collins retired recently, maybe he’s back here too — trading sunny California for this cold, wild, breathtaking view.

My inspiration for this series, Letters to Strangers, comes from the compilation of the same name by Colleen Kinder. She writes: 

“We spend so much of our lives in the company of people whose names we’ll never know, people we’ll never meet again. How rarely we honor them. How rarely we admit to ourselves the strange, unannounced ways they can lodge inside of us. 

These essays don’t say, I knew you. They say, I never really knew you. They confess their own partial gazes. They open up territories we didn’t know we had inside of us. They offer themselves as vessels for our least official ghosts.”

Memory is imperfect, romantic, and often a reflection of ourselves. Writing letters to strangers allows me to embrace this semi-reality. 

With great power, then, comes great ethical disagreements. While AI alignment to human values and goals has become top of mind for academics and corporations in preventing existential doom (more on that later), it shouldn’t come at the expense of ensuring these algorithms are not amplifying human biases.

To be clear, I’m excited about AI, but equally cautious. In the next 5-10 years, leading AI companies predict AI will develop the potential to become an existential threat1. And since the inception of AI, we’ve seen the effects of bias amplification, or when stereotypes or biases in our society are reflected in AI models and amplified in subsequent decision-making. When technological advancement doesn’t just grow, but evolve without our jurisdiction, it becomes imperative that an ethical framework doesn’t just keep up, but proactively sets boundaries and expectations. 

How exactly does the current-day hallucination-prone GPT lead to a doomsday scenario? Let’s first discuss how AI works: deep learning involves training a model, rather than programming a specific task. People refer to “deep learning” because the process is analogous to human learning: arranging a neural network model to perform a task through trial-and-error training. This reward-based gradual tweaking and rearranging of neurons is called stochastic gradient descent, strengthening the important connections while weakening the less relevant ones. Natural language processing2, a type of deep learning used by ChatGPT, specifically uses words with similar semantic meanings to quantify the relationships between each other. 

Similar to how training employees can lead to various, unpredictable incentives, so can AI programs. We already see AI behaving in a manner that may optimize for the “reward” without actually achieving the goal (i.e. system playing dead to avoid being eliminated3), summing up the main concern: goal misgeneralization (a type of goal misalignment). On a smaller scale, misalignment can be annoying and obstructive; when AI begins replacing day-to-day tech and fundamental systems, and/or develops super-intelligence to operate without human guidance, it has the potential to be destructive. 

AI Alignment

The best analogy I’ve read for this problem is by Ajeya Cotra4, who makes the following comparison: you are a young child suddenly left with an $8 trillion company to manage, and now you’re responsible for hiring grownup employees to help you. The pool includes: 

1. Saints: help you short term, and also aligned long-term. 

2. Sycophants: help you short term, but misgeneralize/misunderstand long-term (no malicious intent). 

3. Schemers: help you short term, but actively turn against you as soon as possible (malicious intent). 

As an inexperienced child, you have no insight into each potential employee’s inward motivations, only their outward behavior. Despite your training or reward system, you are unable to really distinguish the types of “employees” from one another, and therefore their intentions remain a mystery. This is the conflict that AI alignment research is dedicated to solving: how to align AI systems to long-term human goals and values, without truly understanding how compute works yet.

There’s thousand-dollar branches being set up at AI companies to focus on alignment, an optimistic indicator that we are thinking about ethical implications. The effective altruism movement, for example, believes AI is positioned to become a massive existential risk. Paul Christianto, previous director of LLM alignment for OpenAI, believes AI has a 10% chance of ending humanity5. Given the magnitude of the risk, AI alignment is definitively focused on preventing the worst case scenario — human extinction or regression beyond return. What is rarely addressed in conversations about alignment, however, is this: human values are fickle, changeable, and often do not reflect perfectly in human behavior. So how do we ensure that in the process of AI alignment, in ensuring all the good parts of human values are captured, we avoid the leakage of misaligned human behaviors and amplification of biases we also possess? 

In addition to being incredibly subjective and ambiguous, “human values” chosen or trained for AI algorithms are always going to lag behind the reality of human values and their unpredictable evolution. As a thought experiment, if AI was trained to be aligned to the according human values and goals into the 19th century, would even the most progressive values of that time bear scrutiny? How can we expect to nail down this moral core in AI from the very beginning? AI alignment cannot be a blanket ethical solution, which is why there’s value in a granular approach when addressing issues like bias amplification. 

Bias Amplification

Bias amplification today primarily begins with a skewed or misrepresented dataset used to train AI models. This crops up often with automated recruitment practices. In 2018, Amazon was exposed for using historical data to build and train a machine-learning recruiting system — data that hadn’t taken into consideration that men were 60% of Amazon’s employees and historically dominated the tech industry6. To no surprise, the algorithm learnt that male candidates were preferable and penalized resumes that included the word “women” in “women’s chess club,” for example. When trained on a biased dataset without considering the implications, natural language processing can form undesired consequences.  

The second way bias amplification happens is within the algorithm model itself — from the way it was developed to the decision-making process. AI algorithms may not be programmed to complete a single task, but they have guidelines and operate on inherent assumptions and prejudices of its programmers. When you consider the lack of diversity in corresponding fields, it goes beyond being a simple representation issue — though only 12% of AI researchers are women and only 6% are software developers as of 20197. Not only are less represented groups missing out on discussions of how systems are deployed, but they’re also likely not involved in conversations about ethical usage.

And while bias amplification is often written off as a secondary problem behind AI alignment, the consequences go beyond “benevolent discrimination,” both currently and in a not-so-distant future that has entrusted AI with critical responsibilities. Author of Invisible Woman, Perez, discusses the healthcare risks of bias amplification8 in a podcast episode. Acknowledging that healthcare is already a deeply inequitable field — clinical trials focusing on men, systemic under-diagnosis, under-representation in the healthcare profession  — Perez brings in guests from the medical field to discuss the risks of deploying AI without screening for potential biases. James Zou, a Stanford University professor in machine learning, mentions how research of potentially cancer-indicating skin lesions were less likely to be identified on darker skin colors due to an algorithm trained mostly on lighter skin colors. Thus, initial bias amplification concerns may seem like an overreaction, but the trajectory of research and development implicates dangerous consequences.

Solutions

The predominant solutions for AI alignment largely focus on technical solutions such as using “scalable oversight” (using AI to monitor each other), creative/thorough ways to train systems, and developing an understanding of inscrutable processing. These technical solutions have the potential to make it easier to discern bias, but unlike alignment problems that can arise and evolve independently from its creator's intent, bias amplification begins with the data and decisions made by developers. Preventing bias amplification, then, requires a bit of nuance, a human touch. The path forward to further the goals of AI alignment without the cost of bias amplification is optimizing human-AI joint work. 

At the forefront of possible solutions includes the preventative measures taken through diverse hiring and governance. Hiring people of diverse identities translates to a wider breadth of knowledge and intuition — more likely to identify blindspots. But it also means hiring people who aren’t just researchers or developers: an OpenAI paper9 suggests hiring social scientists with experience in cognition, behavior, and ethics to work with machine learning algorithms in training value alignment in a more thorough, interdisciplinary method. 

But how do we motivate individual AI developers to prioritize ethical considerations and prevent bias amplification when the data being aggregated comes from various unverified sources? Dr. Katrina Hutchinson, a bioethicist specializing in medical devices featured in Perez’s podcast, suggests two approaches. First, she proposes that the AI community should unite and establish a shared set of rules or standards. This collective agreement aims to ensure that everyone adheres to a common ethical framework, preventing the exploitation of good intentions by rogue individuals. As AI researchers funnel resources into AI alignment, this is the perfect opportunity to develop a set of ethical standards. 

The second approach counteracting bias amplification involves regulatory measures, effective in compelling developers to prioritize ethical practices despite additional burdens or costs. The threat of punishment or market exclusion acts as a strong incentive for compliance, ensuring that developers follow the rules to participate in the industry. Government bodies are justifiably anxious, and international organizations are developing international accords. For example, the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights emphasizes the need for auditing algorithms through discrimination and real-life situation testing to eradicate bias. The UN secretary-general's proposal for a Global Digital Compact at the 2024 Summit of the Future similarly urges a comprehensive exploration of gender biases and solutions in AI. 

There’s already a culture war forming between those with a “long-termist,” apocalyptic view on AI and those who are more focused on more contemporary ethical issues. I argue for an offensive on both fronts. It’s hard to predict what AI is going to look like — if we’re going to be dealing with saints, sycophants, or schemers — but we do know that AI already carves out social chasms by reflecting the underbellies of human values, values that are constantly evolving and surprising us.

Bias amplification may not be an existential risk now, but there’s merit in solving the issues in front of us to prevent them from becoming worse, creating more gaps for misalignment in a not-so-distant future. This inherent shared interest in achieving the best dimensions of human goals bonds these two non-mutually exclusive facets of AI ethics — in the process of aligning AI to our human values, we should ensure it’s not amplifying our human biases. 

High school was a challenge, some of the most agitating years attempting to grasp at my identity, most times completely letting the current of expectations wash through me. I was largely dissatisfied. Not with aspirational dissatisfaction, but rather stagnant acceptance. The dissatisfaction that easily escapes one’s notice until awoken by some shattering in one’s core. So while pinned to what I should be, four years of memories muddle into one another, not with the vibrancy of change, but the unassuming sludge of static. 

I learned to enjoy the slow-living dalliance that is living in Italy1 these past two years, but I grew the most in Hong Kong. In 2021, I ended my sophomore year in a flurry, homesick and exhausted. I’d finished packing up my room — fake leaves peeled off the cork board, a hand-me-down paint-for-numbers that kept me company, and an empty windowsill after giving away the household basil plant. We were all living in the dorms in Tseung Kwan O, an area largely contradictory with Hong Kong’s reputation — quiet and peaceful, mostly inhabited by more elderly residents. In a place with little space for oneself, TKO had become my safe haven. But by August, I was quite literally one of the last students to move out for summer, and I was burned out, aching to leave. 

Yet, when I visited this April, everything was shiny again. The city’s sidewalks seemed to breathe again; without the oppressing humidity of summer, wonder flourished. In particular, glimpses of my life in TKO surged forward, some gravity of the mind buoying up sentimental images of pink pomelo skies and buildings that kiss the sun. Stepping into TKO mall this time, now as a guest, melted hours wandering in the city into years. Hearing the MTR announcements to watch out for the closing doors — first in Cantonese, then Mandarin, then English — teleported me, the faint smell of cigarette smoke and dampness dragging me back farther in time than my body was prepared for. The nostalgia that hit me upon return to Hong Kong was immeasurably greater than the frame of reality. 

How does one year float away so carelessly when the memory is inexplicably heavier? How does my time in Hong Kong feel disproportionately distant, the impression of myself — jarringly younger? Returning was realizing I've spent not decades, only a singular turn of one (e.g., my 20th birthday) perching, journaling, hiding on the massive tide breakers at the TKO waterfront. Returning was a testimony of growth that swung between wistful longing and stinging tenderness. 

All introspection is done in hindsight; growing pains feel like a distant ache until one twists around and probes at a wound that is fresher than expected, remembrance bursting from the skin. So when a catalog of life-defining events happen back-to-back, the present experience passes in flashes; memory of such periods, on the other hand, stretches. Density of quality time spent, in hindsight, begets the perceived quantity of it.

Given this, maybe there is something to be said about the fruits of seeking discomfort, but that isn’t quite the takeaway. Not only is constant change and variety not for everyone, at times it isn’t for anyone. Despite my restlessness, the erratic rhythm that came with moving, changing, adapting often overwhelmed me. The parts of travel that caught me offbeat rarely came from the externalities, but rather the internal cogs shifting to accommodate them. 

I trip over myself thinking about the way I’m dressing, the formal-friendliness ratio for stranger interactions, or how much being Asian Stands Out Here — and maybe part of this is attributed to an overwrought and unnecessary level of self(ish) perception — but maybe it’s the voice that develops when you’re transplanted so often. In the process of dissecting and internalizing experiences in various environments, I almost seem to understand myself more.  

Ultimately, it’s a voice I’m glad to have, and an echo of why I’m always game for the riskier option. After all, it’s the only way to play with the post-facto experience of time like it’s a stretchy thing. 

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The cocktail of emotions surrounding what it means to lack whiteness in Europe has been shaken to its core since I left California. Yet even during my second year studying in Milan, Italy, I still feel hesitant that my experience is one that I can deliver with resounding conclusions and a detached tone. Given the personal nature of this essay, I continue to feel the unspoken responsibility to filter myself from the potent emotions behind the words. Sieving my anger may make it more comfortable for white readers and passing unequivocal messages may make it easier to digest, but doing so also removes what defines my very experience as an Asian-American in Italy. Writing and exposing my honest illustration to scrutiny, then, is the cathartic response that justifies the friction I feel with living in Europe.

I grew up in an extremely Asian neighborhood east of Los Angeles; my graduating year had an approximate ~60% Asian demographic. This translates to neighborhoods populated by people who looked like me, Chinese restaurants that dot the highways, and the embracing of a distinct Asian-American culture. I speak English with my Chinese-speaking friends, yet going out for boba/bubble tea is always implicitly understood. There, I possess personhood. Among peers who share an unspoken context with me, I already speak the same language. Because I never experienced conflict between my cultural and ethnic identity, I could settle into the other aspects of my personality that give me individuality. Given the unique makeup of my suburb, I feel even more at odds with how distant my identity is in Italy.

In Italy, I am confronted with this distinct sense of otherness. Before I am Angela, I am Asian. Complete strangers yell greetings in all sorts of Asian languages in front of the Duomo — or maybe to stay with current events they’ll mutter “coronavirus” when I’m walking alone. In cities too polite to sling slurs, I receive lingering looks that I feel sensitive labeling it as being othered, but too perplexed to call it anything else. Explicit racism is easy for us to pass moral judgements on, and thus, find support for; it is often microaggressions that I find to be an uphill battle to explain. For example, if a stranger holds up a box of mochi and asks if I like it (I am the only Asian person in the store), is my subsequent irritation warranted or should I indulge these interactions because the intent and delivery was friendly? Do I get to own the familiar discomfort of walking into a room as the only person of color? Or do I tell myself — as some acquaintances have done before — that because I am in Europe, in Italy, microaggressions are understandable, unchangeable, and inevitable because this continent is less diverse?

Am I to give what we consider as racism in America a different name when I’m living somewhere else?

Milan actually has one of the largest Chinese populations in Italy. To my initial disbelief, there are around 300,000 Chinese people, the third largest community of foreign nationals, living in Italy (1). Northern Italy has one of the oldest and largest communities in all of the country, with more than 13% of retail companies in the city owned by the Chinese community (2). Yet in addition to being derided by both peers and figures in popular media, these enclaves lack representation in government and corporate leadership positions; a wave that quickly contorted into explicit racism with the onset of COVID-19. When the pandemic hit Italy in 2020, the Chinese population was exposed to xenophobia, violence, and job losses. Public reports of harassment and violence were rampant, including Qian Zhang, 26, who told Il Giornale di Vicenza that he was attacked with a bottle and told he was not allowed to enter a petrol station because, “You’re Chinese, you have coronavirus” (4). In addition to my own run-ins while I was in Milan during the tail-end of COVID measures last school year, university friends in the Chinese-Italian community would recount how they would get spat on, screamed at, and assaulted.

There are far more complexities related to race in Europe beyond my dimension of perspective. In addition to being Chinese, I’m also Chinese-American — some may argue that it's this distinct difference in culture that tends to feel alienating, yet, my white American friends don’t experience the same level of friction. If anything, my proximity to western culture almost makes integration smoother. That’s because whiteness is the default here. Not American-ness, but whiteness. I also acknowledge that my experience of race in Europe is singular to being Chinese-American, and Italian racism often runs even deeper for other minorities who don't share the same level of proximity to such whiteness. And though I am grateful for my community growing up in America, it is burdened with its own set of racial issues, and being white ultimately still feels like the “default” in America; Asian friends who grew up in whiter neighborhoods often echo this sense of otherness. Furthermore, though I was comfortable in the Asian bubble, that is not at all to speak for the comfort and inclusion of other denominations of POC living in my suburb.

This paper may have been borne of emotional stirrings rather than matter-of-fact search for truth, but a year after beginning this draft, I want to validate that this lack of belonging is something present and tangible. I want to validate others with whom I’ve had conversations about how our personal relationship with race manifests so boldly here. And anger does not misrepresent, but rather fleshes out, the truth. Personal investment brings color to the reason I miss my heritage and identity.

And why I eat the most Chinese food in Italy.

References:

1. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/mar/25/as-if-we-were-the-disease-coronavirus-brings-prejudice-for-italys-chinese-workers

2. https://www.dw.com/en/sweet-and-sour-life-of-chinese-residents-in-italys-fashion-capital/a-49592161

3. https://apnews.com/article/race-and-ethnicity-italy-media-social-media-coronavirus-pandemic-36fa3167eb6bd39c1734548a50cf0c6a

4. https://www.ilgiornaledivicenza.it/territori/bassano/cinese-aggredito-trattato-peggio-di-un-animale-1.7963821

As a creature of habit, 2022 was a year of short story collections and sci-fi once again, but it was also a year of discovering the potency of memoirs which are, in my opinion, the perfect grounds to introduce nonfiction writing. While I felt a familiar and immediate pull toward books such as Origin of Species and Parable of the Sower, I was pleasantly blindsided by the heart-wrenching beauty of Know My Name and Persepolis, two books I picked up on a whim.

Feel free to follow my Goodreads account — I love to keep up with what my friends are reading. In order from least to most recently read, and in genres legitimate or entirely made-up, here are my top 5:

1. Know My Name by Chanel Miller

Genre: Memoir, Nonfiction

Favorite quote:

“I survived because I remained soft, because I listened, because I wrote. Because I huddled close to my truth, protected it like a tiny flame in a terrible storm.”

Thoughts:

I’m going to rephrase a random review from Emily May on Goodreads that really sums up how I feel about it: this book was amazing, and not just because this is the memoir of the woman who was sexually assaulted by Brock Turner and was always going to be important. Miller’s writing is immersed in personality, a voice that is not the type of strength I’d imagined to hear before reading — forceful and declarative — but rather a resilience grounded and emboldened by how in touch she is with vulnerability. As one of the book’s main themes, embracing vulnerability is what creates heroes, survivors, and the best storytellers. In addition to her emotional journey, Miller is also chillingly fantastic at describing the frustration of her dehumanizing trials. The critique of injustice does not end with Turner’s sentence but also addresses the “institutional betrayal” of the American justice system, from parallels to victims of police brutality to the public terror surrounding school shootings.

2. Origin of Species by Bo-Young Kim

Genre: Sci-fi, Short stories

Favorite quote:

“Both satellite and star would be named for deities. They would pray to the satellite, they would sing and dance in its soft light, and when the time came for them to turn their gaze to outer space, the satellite would be their first stop. After setting foot on that tiny airless lifeless empty rock they would gather its precious dust in their cupped, spellbound hands.

And they would see stars.”

Thoughts:

The Origin of Species was unlike science fiction I’ve read — unflinchingly absurd, yet deeply curated around the common theme: what makes us human? This underrated collection of stories are translated from Korean and include tales that remind me of Ted Chiang’s whimsical storytelling, though to narrow down Kim’s writing as purely science-fiction would be misleading. Most stories include a surreal and fantastical element — the rapid transmorphisms in “An Evolutionary Myth,” the mythical creatures in “Last of the Wolves,” and the godlike creations in “On the Origin of Species - and What Might Have Happened Thereafter.” As the namesake and longest story, the latter is undoubtedly the standout, but my personal underdog in this collection would be “Stars Shine in the Earth's Sky,” a mini-mystery in the form of a letter, and where I found my favorite quote of all year.

3. Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler

Genre: Sci-fi, no, Afrofuturism

Favorite quote:

“Prodigy, is, at its essence, adaptability and persistent, positive obsession. Without persistence, what remains is an enthusiasm of the moment. Without adaptability, what remains may be channeled into destructive fanaticism. Without positive obsession, there is nothing at all.”

Thoughts:

Despite being published nearly three decades ago, Butler’s vision of a post-climate-apocalypse is terrifyingly realistic and a warning for what’s to come. Set in 2025, people are clinging onto remnants of civilization after violence, disease, and drugs have ravaged America, an otherwise chaotic world contrasted by protagonist Lauren as she traverses the state to light the way for hope and community. This book exemplifies why I love apocalyptic narratives so much — the despair is not the focus, but rather the backdrop for stories of human strength. Butler brings her talent for subtle character development in carving a groundbreaking vision of afrofuturism, a literary movement that explores the intersection of the African diaspora culture with science and technology, while also doubling as a sacred text.

4. The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

Genre: Graphic Novel, Memoir, History

Favorite quote:

(Because its a graphic novel, and the quotes are short, and it’s my blog, I’ll include two —)

“Nothing's worse than saying goodbye. It's a little like dying.”

“I want to be justice, love and the wrath of God all in one.”

Thoughts:

Truly exemplifying the best of both worlds in storytelling, Persepolis is a coming-of-age memoir from author Marjane Satrapi embedded in the historical context of the Iran-Iraq war and the Islamic Revolution. Particularly relevant today, Satrapi encapsulates the political strife, struggles for feminism, and pains of immigration surrounding her while building a personal story that touches on universal trials of life such as a longing for home and the grounding support of family. Not only was it an easy read as one of the best graphic novels I’ve ever picked up, the voice of Satrapi as such an eloquent and empathic “protagonist” often left me stunned and in tears.

5. The Night in Question by Tobias Wolff

Genre: Fiction, Short stories

Favorite quote:

“The bullet is already in the brain; it won’t be outrun forever, or charmed to a halt. In the end it will do its work and leave the troubled skull behind, dragging its comet’s tail of memory and hope and talent and love into the marble hall of commerce.”

Thoughts:

With such simplistic style and seemingly mundane plotlines, I began reading this collection with no idea it would become one of my favorite reads of this year. Despite, or perhaps because of, an oddly neutral tone, the characters of each story become so tangible in less than a few pages, so relatable in how convincingly they lie to themselves. My favorite stories include a soldier dealing with the news of his mother’s passing in “The Other Miller,” a woman’s reimagining of her imperfect marriage in “Lady’s Dream,” and the literal and metaphorical warmth of financial security in “Firelight.” Every story touches on significant aspects life without overdoing it in Wolff’s unassuming prose.

Honorable Mentions:

“There was no one in the world that was ever as critical or could make me feel as hideous as my mother, but there was no one, not even Peter, who ever made me feel as beautiful”

— Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart (this might as well have been my #6 pick, but I’m pretty sure everyone and their dog has read it by now).

“If an unearthly love must (for theological reasons) contain a strong dose of the inexplicable and incomprehensible, his earthly love rested on true misunderstanding.”

— Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“We believe the one who has power. He is the one who gets to write the story. So when you study history, you must ask yourself, Whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice could come forth? Once you have figured that out, you must find that story too. From there you get a clearer, yet still imperfect, picture.”

― Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

“You will be good to me, won’t you? . . . Because we’re going to have a strange life.”

― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he don’t want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there.”

― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

Thanks for reading, and I hope this is helpful for anyone looking to pick up a new book!

In no particular order, and in genres legitimate or entirely made-up, here are my top 5:

1. Self-Help by Lorrie Moore

Genre:

Realistic Fiction, Nihilistic Feminism

Favorite quote:

“Cold men destroy women...They woo them with something personable that they bring out for show, something annexed to their souls like a fake greenhouse, lead you in, and you think you see life and vitality and sun and greenness, and then when you love them, they lead you out into their real soul, a drafty, cavernous, empty ballroom, inexorably arched and vaulted and mocking you with its echoes—you hear all you have sacrificed, all you have given, landing with a loud clunk.”

Thoughts: Disclaimer — this is not actually a self-help book, but structured in a way that is reminiscent of one, with each chapter its own story. Moore explores the complexity of relationships and the struggles of being a modern woman with clever puns, gorgeous metaphors, and an unflinching tone. She also doesn’t hesitate to command these stories with unique form: “How to Be The Other Woman” is a manual on — you guessed it — how to be the other woman, “How to Talk to Your Mother” is a reverse-chronological collection of diary entries, and almost every story is written in an uncomfortable second-person imperative. I spent every moment marveling at how fun it was to read even when the topics weren’t; rather, her playful style brought a level of intimacy to her anthology that saddened, empowered, and delighted me all at once.

2. Rape of Nanking By Iris Chang

Genre:

Nonfiction, History, Pain

Favorite quote:

“I was suddenly in a panic that this terrifying disrespect for death and dying, this reversion in human social evolution, would be reduced to a footnote of history, treated like a harmless glitch in a computer program that might or might not again cause a problem, unless someone forced the world to remember it.”

Thoughts: For those who are unfamiliar, the Rape of Nanking is one of history’s most gruesome atrocities, yet remains relatively unacknowledged due to overwhelming denial from the Japanese government and lack of coverage in western media. I have so much respect for Chang who is one of the first authors of all time to document both primary evidence and a comprehensive analysis of this historical event in an accessible, packaged manner. Chang weaves in stunning information from diary entries of Japanese soldiers and survivor testimonies into an effortless narrative filled with context, psychology, and historiography. Though justifiably hard to read at times (please read trigger warnings before picking this up), this book sparked unprecedented awareness amongst a western audience. After all, when such a horror hits so close to home — Chang is an Asian-American whose grandparents fled Nanking — her subjective perspective on this objective documentation gifts us with her amazing writing and brings another dimension to the truth.

3. Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

Genre:

Historical Fiction, More Pain

Favorite quote:

“A woman’s lot is to suffer. We must suffer... All her life, Sunja had heard this sentiment from other women, that they must suffer—suffer as a girl, suffer as a wife, suffer as a mother—die suffering. Go-saeng—the word made her sick. What else was there besides this?”

Thoughts: Historical fiction deserves so much appreciation in breathing life into history — especially with lesser known moments of history — and Lee accomplishes just that through the illuminating telling of the Japanese occupation of Korea, World War II, and the spread of western influence through four generations of a Korean family. Lee creates a powerful narrative primarily through the unwavering strength of her female characters — women who have never lived for themselves, but to wholeheartedly support their families. They deal not only with racism and oppression in the macrocosm of Japanese colonization, but also the internal struggles within the microcosm of their families. Written with a calm, no-nonsense voice, Pachinko became one of my favorites this year through its heart-wrenching tales of generational suffering (only amplified by my immigrant-child-guilt).

4. Exhalation by Ted Chiang

(Stories of Your Life & Others is also brilliant)

Genre:

Science Fiction, What Black Mirror Wishes It Was

Favorite quote:

“My message to you is this: Pretend that you have free will. It’s essential that you behave as if your decisions matter, even though you know they don’t. The reality isn’t important; what’s important is your belief, and believing the lie is the only way to avoid a waking coma. Civilization now depends on self-deception. Perhaps it always has.”

Thoughts: 2021 was a year of rediscovering the joy of anthologies — low commitment, short and sweet. And Chiang is quickly becoming one of my favorite writers, a certified genius who uses both popular sci-fi tropes (such as time travel) and long-discarded theories (such as the omphalos hypothesis) to masterfully create intriguing plots. In addition to the namesake story, my favorites in this collection include “The Lifecycle of Software Objects,” an exploration of human rights for artificial intelligence, and “Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom,” a tale of existential crisis after technology allows for parallel universes. I appreciate how each chapter is still its own mind-bending, complex plot in so few pages, connected only through Chiang’s fantastic storytelling and a pertinent commentary on the human experience.

5. Dune by Frank Herbert

Genre:

Science Fiction, Fantasy?

Favorite quote:

"Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic."

Thoughts: I 100% began reading this book in preparation for the movie adaptation by one of my favorite directors. Though it was difficult to sink into at first, it became an absolute page turner around halfway in (or if you have Dune Wiki pulled up while reading). Past that point, I was knee-deep-immersed into Dune’s rich world-building, political games, and iconic sandworms. As a plot-driven novel, Herbert sacrifices some character depth for the fascination and curiosity he inspires with each detail, custom, or technology he introduces to readers, and does so in a way that never feels forced. I also found it impressive that despite Dune being one of the shapers of modern science fiction, it reads like something that could’ve been written today — entirely original despite its expansive influence.

Honorable Mentions via Quotes That Hit Different:

“Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size… That is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist so emphatically upon the inferiority of women, for if they were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge… For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished.” — A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf

“There she is, a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake.” — My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh

“The modern deal offers humans an enormous temptation, coupled with a colossal threat. Omnipotence is in front of us, almost within our reach, but below us yawns the abyss of complete nothingness.” — Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari

“There is the humility of being a father to someone so powerful, as if he were only a narrow conduit for another, greater thing. That’s how it feels right now, he thinks, kneeling beside her, rinsing her hair: as though his love for his daughter will outstrip the limits of his body. The walls could fall away, even the whole city, and the brightness of that feeling would not wane.” — All The Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr

Thanks for reading!

As two cities with overwhelming unhoused populations, Los Angeles and New York City continue to struggle with adequately providing for its citizens. While the policies in LA mostly prioritize long-term affordable housing, NYC’s focus on temporary housing has successfully sheltered the majority of the unhoused population. LA’s lack of fundamental legal precedents and misaligned way of living also calls for more disruptive change. The combination of high rent, low wages, increasing gentrification, and the COVID-19 pandemic has only worsened the homeless crisis in both cities as the root of the problem remains largely unaddressed: the housing crisis.

This paper will address the different political approaches taken by these two prominent cities, a weighing of each approach, and finally, how a comparison can be used to highlight the potential of future policies.

Ways to Help in LA

• Educate

• Understanding the causes and destigmatizing homelessness allows for more appropriate, targeted aid

• Political Action

• Support the Garcetti Plan that aims to dedicate $791 million toward constructing homes for the unhoused

• Support Assembly Bill 71, a $2.4 million proposal toward homelessness and housing efforts in California

• Contact the L.A. City Council Member from your district on supporting these efforts

• Donate/Volunteer

• PATH: provides interim shelters, housing communities, and outreach teams

• Chrysalis: provides skillbuilding services to help clients find and retain jobs

• Good Shepherd Center: supports women and children in guiding them out of homelessness

• The People Concern: social service organization with a focus on a fully integrated system of support

Table of Contents

1. Context

   1. Causes of Homelessness 

   2. The Right to Shelter 

2. The L.A. Approach

   1. Proposition HHH 

   2. Rapid Rehousing Program 

   3. LAHSA 

   4. The Root 

3. The N.Y. Approach

   1. Callahan v. Carey 

   2. Safe Havens  

   3. The Journey Back Home 

   4. Preventing Evictions 

   5. HOME-STAT 

   6. The Root 

4. Comparing the Approaches        

   1. Differences 

   2. Similarities 

   3. Solutions 

5. Conclusion      

6. Bibliography     

Context

To set up an appropriate comparison, there needs to be adequate context of the current situation of homelessness. Los Angeles’s annual unhoused count in June 2020 showed a number of 66,433 people without permanent housing, a 12.7% increase since 2019’s report (16). Of that number, 75% are living unsheltered and on the streets, and 25% are mentally ill. While many attribute the rising number to LA’s temperate, forgiving outdoor conditions, 75% of the population lived in the city before losing their homes. This means that unhoused people are not merely flocking to LA. because of its climate — a common myth — but because LA’s internal problems and economic policies make it difficult for low-income families to stay afloat. In essence, the root of LA’s issue is internal, and it will require proactive measures to counteract and prevent. Undoubtedly, COVID-19’s impact in the previous year will have rippling consequences, leaving tens of thousands of low-wage workers without homes over the next three years, according to a model projected from the 2008 financial crisis (23).

Though New York shows slightly lower numbers with 60,422 unhoused people in April 2020, the city still projects an increase in homelessness, the highest rate since the Great Depression (1). Unlike Los Angeles, only 5% of, or 4,000, unhoused people are unsheltered, with the rest living in shelters or temporary housing. While a 2019 city survey showed that these numbers could be higher than initially believed with still a long way to go in “solving” the homeless crisis, NY can serve as a model for homeless policies.

These slight differences in severity bring context into their respective policies, but the problems both cities face are similar and demonstrate a pressing need for support. Combined, NY and LA makeup 40.6% of the U.S. unhoused population. While NY has been able to house many of its unhoused population, LA is struggling.

Causes of Homelessness

In both cities, the main causes of homelessness are a combination of insufficient, low wages, a lack of affordable housing, and gentrification. As poorer communities are rebuilt to fit middle or upper class tastes, families who can no longer afford to live in their homes are displaced and have trouble finding cheaper places (7). One misconception is that poverty is the leading reason for homelessness, but it is specifically “being poor in a place where ferocious competition for a severely constrained supply of homes drives up rents” (18). For example, while Detroit has a larger population below the poverty line, its unhoused population is still smaller than that of New York’s. In fact, when a city’s average rent reaches 22% of the median income, then homelessness will rise. Given that LA is at 49%, it is reasonable to conclude that a major driving factor of homelessness is the housing crisis. Other factors also include mental illness, drug addiction, and lack of employment skills. City -wide deinstitutionalization of psychiatric hospitals and asylums have also resulted in higher displacement of people on the streets. As city governments lobby for policies that leave many in poverty and homelessness, they need to provide safety nets for the people being affected.

A discussion about homelessness should also address the systemic racism that has disproportionately affected the African-American community. Despite only making up 8% of the LA population, African-Americans make up 34% of the unhoused population. According to the Homeless Services Authority, this is attributed to discrimination in housing, health care, justice and economic policies (16). Not only have decades of red-lining, generational wealth gaps, and an unequal standard of living set back people of color, but a black American is also less likely to be paid at the same rate as a white American with the same education. Black Americans are also more likely to be affected by gentrification, as freeways built into black communities commonly displaced families into homelessness. These multiple factors cause homelessness to disproportionately affect oppressed minorities. As a result, reformative policy should also address systemic racism and homeless relief should be able to support a diverse population.

The Right to Shelter

Though homelessness is never optimal, being sheltered improves the standard of living; unsheltered people do not have access to bathrooms, showers, suitable sleeping conditions, and many other basic necessities (5). Furthermore, they’re especially vulnerable to diseases such as typhus, typhoid, and Hepatitis A. Unsheltered people are also more likely to both perpetrate and be victims of violence, specifically sexual violence toward women (3). Movements such as the #SheDoes campaign arose due to outcries that the LA city government was inactive in keeping its unhoused women protected from sexual assault. Most recently, the COVID-19 epidemic has also revealed key vulnerabilities of the unsheltered: unhoused people living in LA County were 50% more likely to die of COVID than the general population (22).

In addition to being a primary driver for homelessness, systemic racism also affects the quality of support services offered. After receiving homeless services, black youth were twice as likely to fall back into homelessness due to incompatible and unequal treatment (21).

Above all, the right to shelter is a fundamental human right; all humans deserve a safe, clean and stable living situation. According to the United Nations, homelessness is a “cruel and inhumane” humanitarian crisis that requires proactive efforts from both national and local governments. Institutions that perpetuate and have the means to solve homelessness also possess the responsibility to take direct action, which is why LA and NY should be going further to both alleviate and solve homelessness.

The LA Approach

In response to the growing homeless crisis, Mayor Eric Garcetti initially aimed to build emergency shelters in all 15 districts. His ambitious goals were soon halted by red tape, or bureaucratic hurdles, and widespread community fear of unhoused people moving into their neighborhoods. In fact, 80% of the proposed emergency shelters have been postponed, demonstrating resistance and difficulty in implementing short-term efforts like those of New York (2). Alternatively, Los Angeles seems to focus more on prioritizing long-term affordable housing, yet the fallout hasn’t exactly been successful. This can be due to the fact that there has not been a sustained effort from the city; a 2018 audit showed that LA spends $5,000 per unhoused citizen, compared to the $17,000 that New York spends (15). In general, LA’s homeless effort is unfocused, and its policies are not as efficient or effective as intended.

Proposition HHH

To be fair, the 2018 audit did not take into account the recent bill, Measure HHH, a $1.2 billion tax hike passed in November 2016 that was intended to provide first aid, rent money assistance, and expand bridge housing, or temporary, transitional housing. The main goal was to construct 10,000 units over the next decade for bridge housing, but nearly three years after its passing, the first unit was only opened in January 2020.

The problem with this plan is its insufficient funds, long building period, and lack of support in emergency projects. After years of uncompleted projects and meager aid being provided, LA Chief Accountant Ron Galperin released an October 2019 audit that aimed to explain the gaps in the policy. First, he demonstrated that rising construction costs, estimated to cost more than $700,000 per 41-unit building, will affect the utility of the bill. Additionally, the city sold many of the HHH bonds before the proceeds would be used, costing at least $5.2 million in unnecessary interest payments. Galperin predicts that these setbacks will only allow 7,640 of the proposed 10,000 units to be built (8).

The funds intended for this project are also largely untouched, as supportive building projects take three to six years to complete. Given the inhumanity of the conditions unhoused people face, construction time is a pertinent issue. Long-term projects are absolutely necessary, but the lengthy waiting period in between needs to be supplemented by immediate relief.

Instead, Galperin suggests that the finite, public money should “find a way to get people into shelter as quickly as possible to relieve some of that suffering we see happening on our streets,” which can be alleviated through temporary shelters, storage facilities, bathroom and shower facilities, and other service centers (9). In essence, though the idea behind Measure HHH seemed adequate, the actual reality of fund distribution and execution disappoints.

Rapid Rehousing Program

Another prominent program implemented in recent years is the rapid rehousing program, which provides short-term vouchers, or subsidies, that cover security deposits and the first few months of rent. This program is funded by 16% of the recent sales tax increase that brings $73 million a year to the unhoused population (17). Though recipients of this program agree that having shelter is a far better option than living unsheltered, they struggle with paying rent after the assistance expires. According to the Homeless Services Authority, nearly 18,000 people have benefitted from rapid rehousing. While there aren’t thorough records of those who have gone through the program, an estimated 7% returned back to homeless shelters.

Rapid rehousing, while helpful to some, has cracks in its implementation due to the lack of widespread support. For those who have the financial means and skills to find a sufficiently paying job, the program works, but this program is not a suitable plan for all unhoused people. In New York, a similar program ran between 2005 and 2011 proved that the temporary decreases in unsheltered homeless did not last. Ralph Nunez, president of a public policy think tank, called it a “nightmare… creating a great number of problems that they’ve never been able to get their arms around again.” The theory of pushing L.A.’s unhoused population to be more self-sufficient is sound, but current circumstances call for multi-pronged, short-term relief.

LAHSA

In the same audit mentioned earlier, the effectiveness of the Los Angeles Homelessless Service Authority (LAHSA) is put into question (9). Galperin’s report claims that the outreach done by this program is too reactive and not proactive, resulting in duplicative visits tied to encampment cleanups. Additionally, outreach workers are tasked with signing unhoused people up for government services, but given that the programs are mostly intended for specific groups such as veterans or families, the vast majority of unhoused people—single adults—are deprived of sufficient resources. In general, LAHSA lacks its own autonomy to make decisions and help; it needs third parties like the city government to make available living spaces.

The Root of the L.A. Crisis

Focusing on long-term issues isn't inherently a bad direction, but many of the proposed solutions for homelessness end up to be temporary. This is especially true because of the underlying housing crisis that no amount of relief will solve. To illustrate the issue in LA, as Garcetti moved 380 people off the street each week, 480 more people were joining the unhoused population (15). The influx of people losing their homes and living on the streets comes at an overwhelming rate that negates the positive effects of any temporary efforts. Thus, in addition to short-term relief, LA should begin to address the root of the problem: the housing crisis.

That’s not to say this issue hasn’t been attempted to be resolved in the past. In early 2019, California governor Gavin Newsom set a goal of building 3.5 million units over the next seven years and proposed $1.7 billion to incentivize housing production (14). These goals, in the form of Senate Bill 50, were intended to set restrictions on density by denying transportation funds to local governments that failed to meet them. As such an ambitious plan, the zoned land needed to build these homes were insufficient and would require a new form of high-density housing.

This proposed new way of life is what caused the bill to be shot down. Though SB 50 would’ve boosted California’s housing stock over time, it died in committee because it was considered a threat to local control. Many constituents also feared the bill, as it would’ve caused disruptive change. Currently, California and LA enjoy sprawling single-family houses; the bill calls for high-density apartments. Reihan Salam, President of the Manhattan Institute, describes this as a fear of “the transformation of large swaths of Los Angeles into unsanitary homeless encampments” (15). Many people are understandably opposed to the transformation that will change their way of living, but it’s a privilege to prefer single-family housing. In reality, the thousands of unhoused people deserve LA’s attention and sacrifice.

Recent developments include LA Mayor Garcetti’s $1 billion plan to address homelessness, beginning with transitional homes built in February.

The New York Approach

New York’s primary focus on the right to shelter and short-term emergency relief has allowed the majority of its unhoused population to receive shelter, while still putting forward prevention-first policies. The number of unsheltered people has never fallen below 2,300, though record levels have been reached under Mayor Bill de Blasio’s term (20).

Overall though, the unhoused population has declined for two years in a row. This can be attributed to multiple factors and policies that differ from LA. For starters, the 2018 audit mentioned earlier showed that NY spent around $17,000 per unhoused resident, helping nearly 2,500 people off the streets and onto temporary or permanent housing since 2016. From proactive measures to unique support, New York can serve as a model for cities dealing with homelessness.

Callahan v. Carey

In the 1970s, when modern homelessness first arose in New York City, a class action lawsuit was brought by lawyer Robert Hayes against the city and state. He represented unhoused men, including lead plaintiff Robert Callahan, who was suffering from alcoholism, in bringing attention to Article XVII of the NY State Constitution that states “the aid, care and support of the needy are public concerns and shall be provided by the state and by such of its subdivisions…” (4). It became a landmark case that agreed on a consent decree that NY is obligated to provide shelter for unhoused men. This decree was later expanded by Eldredge v. Koch (1982) to extend to unhoused women, and by Koster v. Webb (1982) to unhoused families.

This case was fundamental in the amount of shelters that have been provided by the state, though it has been violated multiple times. Hayes later founded the Coalition for the Homeless, a New York advocacy group for the unhoused. Callahan v. Carey set a unique legal precedent for New York and its homeless policies for years to come. 

Safe Havens

In addition to traditional dormitory-style shelters, New York also offers alternative housing through safe havens. These shelters are less selective, have less regulations and were first launched in July 2017. Most significantly, individuals are not required to be sober in these safe havens. This project also offers case management, mental health, and substance abuse services. Currently, there are 11 safe havens in NYC with 550 beds; this is a relatively small number relative to the amount of unhoused people. Thus, while safe havens offer shelter to those who don’t typically receive access to shelters, there are still limitations to its use.

The process to switch from a traditional shelter to safe havens can be difficult. For one, safe havens are funded by the United States Department of Housing, which requires entrants to have either a physical or mental disability—including addiction—potentially cutting off support to some groups. Additionally, those who want to move into safe havens must be confirmed by outreach workers that they are living on the streets. This usually means that the person in question must be spotted at least three times, a confusing and tedious process (20). Safe havens are not panaceas to unsheltered homelessness, but they have potential to be better alternatives given sufficient numbers.

The Journey Back Home

In December 2019, De Blasio announced “The Journey Back Home” plan that aims to create 1,000 permanent apartments and 1,000 more safe haven beds (6). By emphasizing a moral imperative, the goal is to end long term street homelessness in NYC in the next five years. In addition to the new building units, the plan also includes delivering new health resources, providing outreach response, individualizing services through innovative technology, and expanding diversion and outreach in the subway system.

Above all, the plan hopes to create pathways to permanent home ownership. One initiative aims to work with the Department of Housing and Development to convert privately-owned, vacant properties into apartments that can be used. Others include connecting unsheltered residents with rental assistance and streamlining placement processes.

Preventing Evictions

As evictions are a major cause to homelessness, New York City is the first American city to announce Right To Counsel (RTC) in 2017. By giving tenants with incomes lower than 200% of the federal poverty line access to an attorney, legal representation has been mostly successful in preventing homelessness. For example, since 2013, the rate of eviction has decreased by 40%, and more than 400,000 New Yorkers are estimated to have been positively impacted by this law (10). This measure shows that NYC is not merely focusing on emergency short-term relief, but prioritizes its prevention-first policy.

HOME-STAT

The Department of Homeless Services in NY implemented the Homeless Outreach & Mobile Engagement Street Action Services, or HOME-STAT, that consistently canvasses all five boroughs and reach out to unhoused people living on the streets. They are also intended to provide aftercare services that can help individuals transition to permanent housing. Some successes of this organization include tripling the city’s investment to $140 million, tripling the number of safe haven beds, building the city’s first named list of homeless individuals, and establishing joint outreach with hospitals and government agencies.

The Root of the NY Crisis

While New York City can be credited with moving the majority of its unhoused population into shelters, which staves off the worst effects of living on the streets, there are also areas to improve upon. NYC has invested in homeless prevention, yet—like LA—still avoids the central issue at hand: the housing crisis.

Coalition for the Homeless Policy Director Giselle Routhier states “we can’t solve homelessness without addressing the affordability and stability crisis.” In that regard, more effort needs to be put into creating more affordable housing units. For example, of the de Blasio plan to create 300k apartments, the city has only hit half that goal, with less than a sixth being accessible to low-income families (13). This means that more housing units will not necessarily result in lower rates of homelessness, as impoverished demographics are not sufficiently supported.

Because building new apartments can be too expensive, a cheaper solution for the government is to finance nonprofits in clearing and rebuilding unused spaces. This would allow for cheaper options for low-income families, getting closer to solving the housing crisis than simply building more units. Otherwise, as a result of the lack of action at the roots of the issue, more than half of the 33,000 people New York claims to have moved out of homelessness eventually fell back into it (13).

Another dilemma faced by city developers is the minority of unhoused people who refuse shelter—whether that is due to mental illness, drug addiction or personal preference. Shelter is sometimes enforced, but the morality of those actions are questionable. Simultaneously, the laws that prosecute unhoused people dwelling in certain public areas implicitly make it difficult for them to stay unsheltered. However, given that only 5% of the unhoused demographic is unsheltered in N.Y.C, it is within reach to implement support programs that build trust with this minority community.

Comparing the Approaches

In this section, I will be reviewing the similarities, differences and potential, optimal solutions for both cities. While the differences between LA and NYC show the areas of improvement that Los Angeles needs to follow, the similarities in the homeless crisis indicate larger issues at hand.

Differences

Due to the fundamental differences in goals between LA and NYC’s policies, New York is more successful in treating its existing unhoused population. The disparities in percentages (75% in LA versus 5% in NYC) of unsheltered homeless are reflective of this difference. While LA struggles with being able to provide its residents with enough shelters, NYC has prioritized shelter—even if temporary—for its unhoused population.

Why exactly is it so important to provide shelter? According to physician Marc Siegel at NYU Langone Health, while diseases “were still a problem... they weren’t nearly as severe as when so much of the unhoused population was bedless” (19). Essentially, while policies should focus on long-term solutions, it is equally important to pay attention and assist those in homelessness as soon as possible. Additionally, living in a stable, clean location makes it easier for doctors to locate and treat unhoused people who are suffering from these diseases.

This difference also manifests because of the early establishment of constitutional rights that shape not only politicians’ perspectives and ambitions but also voter expectations. The right to shelter legislation established in New York set a unique precedent that LA does not have; as a result, lawmakers are less likely to follow or be motivated to provide shelters. Activists do not have a legal precedent to wield over the government in case of neglect. Contrarily, in NYC, many lawsuits were able to follow the ethos of the original Callahan v. Carey case in keeping the local government responsible for its unsheltered population.

The existing differences between the two cities also affect how receptive citizens are to change. Given the existing urban sprawl—low-density, unplanned and mostly residential development—in Los Angeles, a majority of voters and politicians are hesitant to let go of the single-family homes and space that they currently enjoy. This type of urban planning doesn’t consider the greater good; rather, it translates to required driving, wasting usable space and creating unnecessary pollution (11).

On the other hand, New York City resembles the typical, compact city space with densely-packed buildings. These differences in urban planning make it easier for New York to pass laws to either build new units or refurbish old ones that are accessible to lower-income families. For example, LA’s Senate Bill 50 would’ve eased the housing crisis, but because of rampant fear of losing urban sprawl and fear of unhoused people entering their neighborhoods, it was rejected by the council. Proposition HHH and further policies that attempt to touch on the housing crisis will continue to be held back because of the limited space in LA for more buildings. If LA wants to better support its unhoused population and solve the housing crisis, more disruptive change is required than in New York.

Similarities

The similarities the two cities share in its homeless outreach is reflective of the problems plaguing both cities and give insight on how to solve the root of the problem.

First, the biggest struggle of both cities is the transition from temporary housing to permanent housing. Even in New York, where the majority of the unhoused are sheltered, most cannot afford to keep their rents. As mentioned earlier in the paper, a rapid rehousing program was used in both cities. By subsidizing the rental costs for a few months, it aimed to give unhoused people the support and time needed to find a job. While this method did work for some, it wasn’t able to provide enough to others. As a result, many who went through the program ended up back in homelessness.

By looking at the original causes for homelessness, LA and NYC share similarities. Both are cities that, even with lower poverty rates than other cities, have average rental rates higher than 22% of the median household income. The combination of low wages and high rents not only causes homelessness, but keeps those on the streets trapped. It prevents government aid and programs, such as rapid rehousing, from bringing homeless people back into stable housing.

Potential Solutions

By analyzing both the successes and failures of current policies, I’ve outlined a selection of optimal policies for city governments to adopt. Beginning to solve the homeless crisis can be completed through two parts: first by solving the basic problem of homelessness through increasing the supply of houses, and then by addressing more specific issues, such as sheltering and providing aid to unhoused people with mental illnesses or drug addiction.

Though nonprofits and activists are crucial in providing support, conventional public policy is the most effective method to root out the cause. Reforms that increase the supply of housing and include low-cost housing that can still meet the needs of the poor can stem the rapid influx of people entering homelessness. Meanwhile, more steps can be made—especially in Los Angeles—to provide shelter with less regulations and steps. Emergency relief needs to be prioritized as people are currently suffering the effects of exposure.

In addition to solving the housing crisis, cities need to invest in alternative support. As New York City showed, paying for lawyers to represent those faced with eviction can help prevent the fall into homelessness. Not only should low-income families receive direct financial support, but this legal support can serve as a safety net for those who are on the edge of losing their residencies.

Another form of policy that governments can emphasize more is actively preparing unhoused people to receive jobs. USC Social Entrepreneurship professor Adlai Wertman started an organization called Chrysalis, an organization that offers case management, skill development and job search assistance (12). This form of service is more individualized and provides flexibility in each person’s needs. It also sets unhoused people up for permanent jobs, income, and as a result, housing. Though some shelters do offer case management, having the government either set up or better fund organizations such as Chrysalis will allow for more long-term support.

Conclusion

As cities with increasingly severe cases, Los Angeles and New York have the obligation to provide short-term relief and shelter, while actively developing policies that will solve the housing crisis.

Bibliography

1. Basic Facts About Homelessness: New York City. www.coalitionforthehomeless.org/basic-facts-about-homelessness-new-york-city/.

2. Beason, Tyron, et al. Homelessness Is a Crisis in California. Why Are 2020 Candidates Mostly Ignoring It? 10 June 2019, www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-2020-homelessness-presidential-campaign-20190610-story.html.

3. Cagle, Katie. Crimes Involving Homeless People as Perpetrators and Victims Both Increased. spectrumnews1.com/ca/la-west/news/2019/05/07/crime-among-the-homeless-explodes-in-los-angeles.

4. “The Callahan Legacy: Callahan v. Carey and the Legal Right to Shelter.” Coalition For The Homeless, www.coalitionforthehomeless.org/our-programs/advocacy/legal-victories/the-callahan-legacy-callahan-v-carey-and-the-legal-right-to-shelter/.

5. Column: Rats at the Police Station, Filth on L.A. Streets - Scenes from the Collapse of a City That's Lost Control. 1 June 2019, www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-lopez-skid-row-rats-trash-20190601-story.html.

6. De Blasio, Bill. The Journey Home: An Action Plan to End Long-Term Street Homelessness.

7. Gentrification and Dislocation of Los Angeles' Urban Poor Leading to Homelessness. www.smartcitiesdive.com/ex/sustainablecitiescollective/gentrification-and-dislocation-los-angeles-urban-poor-leading-homeles/1030941/.

8. LAist Staff in News on October 8, 2019 10:40 AM. “Three Years And Zero Homeless Housing Units Later, LA's Auditor Looks At Prop HHH Money.” LAist, laist.com/2019/10/08/prop_hhh_homeless_housing_audit.php.

9. Matt Tinoco in News on February 4, 2019 1:00 PM. “LA's Chief Accountant Wants To Know Why All The Anti-Homelessness Money Isn't Being Spent.” LAist, laist.com/2019/02/04/proposition_HHH_audit_los_angeles_homeless.php.

10. “Mayor De Blasio Announces Record-Breaking 41 Percent Decrease in Evictions Citywide.” The Official Website of the City of New York, 24 Feb. 2020, www1.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/094-20/amid-nationwide-increases-mayor-de-blasio-record-breaking-41-percent-decrease-in.

11. Murphy, Douglas. “Where Is the World's Most Sprawling City?” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 19 Apr. 2017, www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/apr/19/where-world-most-sprawling-city-los-angeles.

12. “Our Services.” Chrysalis, www.changelives.org/about-us/our-services/.

13. Ricciulli, Valeria. “Housing, Rental Vouchers, Outreach: Can NYC Fix Its Homeless Crisis?” Curbed NY, Curbed NY, 25 Feb. 2020, ny.curbed.com/2020/2/25/21146143/homelessness-new-york-city-how-to-fix.

14. Salam, Reihan. “Gavin Newsom's Big Idea.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 15 Feb. 2019, www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/02/governor-newsom-addresses-californias-housing-crisis/582892/.

15. Salam, Reihan. “Los Angeles Is in Crisis. So Why Isn't It Building More Housing?” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 25 June 2019, www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/how-solve-los-angeless-homelessness-crisis/591976/.

16. Scott, Anna. Homelessness In Los Angeles County Rises Sharply. 12 June 2020, www.npr.org/2020/06/12/875888864/homelessness-in-los-angeles-county-rises-sharply.

17. Scott, Anna. “Rental Vouchers for L.A.'s Homeless Provide Short-Term Fix For Long-Term Problem.” NPR, NPR, 24 Apr. 2019, www.npr.org/2019/04/24/716743009/rental-vouchers-for-las-homeless-provide-short-term-fix-for-long-term-problem.

18. Siegel, Jacob. Managed Obsolescence: Homelessness in America's Gilded Cities. 20 Feb. 2019, americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/02/managed-obsolescence-homelessness-in-americas-gilded-cities/.

19. Siegel, Marc. “Op-Ed: Los Angeles Should Look to New York for Answers to Its Homeless Problem.” Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times, 17 July 2019, www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2019-07-16/homelessness-los-angeles-new-york.

20. Stewart, Nikita. “New York's Toughest Homeless Problem.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 30 May 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/05/30/nyregion/homeless-nyc.html.

21. Unity Care. Systemic Racism Worsens Homelessness for People of Color. www.unitycare.org/systemic-racism-worsens-homelessness-for-people-of-color/.

22. Oreskes, Benjamin, and Doug Smith. “L.A.'s Homeless Are 50% More Likely to Die If They Get COVID. Now They're a Vaccine Priority.” Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times, 12 Mar. 2021, www.latimes.com/homeless-housing/story/2021-03-12/la-homeless-50-percent-more-likely-die-covid.

23. Smith, Doug. “COVID-19 Job Losses Will Worsen L.A. Homelessness by 2023, New Report Says.” Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times, 12 Jan. 2021, www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-01-12/new-report-foresees-tens-of-thousands-losing-homes-by-2023.

While it seemed that poorer areas of Los Angeles were less affected during the first stage of the pandemic, this discrepancy was actually attributed to a lack of testing. During the earlier months, the virus was not seen as a severe issue by public health officials; as a result, only the wealthy and famous had access to testing kits, which were not free in L.A. until April 29 (1). In fact, the second phase of the pandemic shows a massive surge in infections in poorer communities such as Pico-Union and Westlake, where the most deaths in L.A. have been reported. The smaller amount of initial numbers resulted in an even higher lack of concern and attention for these impoverished communities.

Another issue faced by low-income communities of color is the lack of resources in place, such as housing and healthcare, to prevent and treat coronavirus cases. For example, the dearth of adequate housing and the higher percentage of homelessness in poorer communities contributes to an even higher infection rate. The L.A. County has half of the most crowded addresses in the nation, forcing many people into smaller spaces, making it difficult to properly social distance (4). As discussed in an earlier post, the federal government’s history of segregated housing policies established a correlation between race and wealth, leading to only 44% of black people who are homeowners compared to 74% of white people in 2020 (3). The pandemic further worsened these issues as many now face the threat of eviction from being unable to pay their rent. In addition, rising healthcare prices prevent many low-income families from receiving treatment. The healthcare system already harms black people through implicit bias, providing lower-quality services and ignoring patient concerns, and the current situation only increases the threat to marginalized groups (2).

The preexisting economic conditions left those in poverty vulnerable to the pandemic, and even when the virus is gone, the following recession will hit them the hardest. Generational wealth equates to comfort and safety in times of crisis, assurances that whiter and wealthier neighborhoods have the privilege to experience. Those with privilege (including myself) are able to work remotely, order food and groceries online, and isolate in their own houses. On the other hand, many in disadvantaged neighborhoods do not have the option of working at home because of the disproportionate hiring of black and brown people in the service industry. Even this job distribution is caused by systemic racism: while education ⁠— which leads to higher paying jobs ⁠— seems to be the escape from poverty, the typical black household headed by someone with an advanced degree has less wealth than a white household with only a high school diploma. The difference widens 10x more when white and black households have the same level of education; this disparity is attributed to a lack of initial wealth and racial biases that prevent employment (3).

As a result, frontline workers are largely composed of marginalized groups and are exposed more frequently to the virus. Those who are not working have lost their jobs, and only 48.8% black adults are employed, lower than the number for other ethnicities (though employment has dropped in general). Furthermore, a higher rate of black businesses, already at a capital disadvantage, are forced to close compared to white businesses (5). From the beginning, disadvantages have been stacked up against black communities, and the pandemic shows how each factor seems to reinforce each other in a cyclical manner.

As UCLA professor Travis Longcore stated:

the pandemic has “just laid bare the structural inequalities of the country. It couldn’t be better designed to fillet open the inequality of the country because of the two completely different experiences” (1).

The vulnerability of poorer communities, largely composed of black and indigenous people of color due to systemic racism, has been highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic, bringing attention to the flaws of existing infrastructure and laws.

Bibliography:

1. Barboza, Tony, et al. “Coronavirus Ravages Poorer L.A. Communities While Slowing in Wealthier Ones, Data Show.” Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times, 28 May 2020, www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-05-28/coronavirus-surge-in-poor-l-a-county-neighborhoods-reveals-two-americas.

2. Bridges, Khiara M. “Implicit Bias and Racial Disparities in Health Care.” American Bar Association, www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/the-state-of-healthcare-in-the-united-states/racial-disparities-in-health-care/.

3. Heather Long, Andrew Van Dam. “Analysis | The Black-White Economic Divide Is as Wide as It Was in 1968.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 4 June 2020, www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/06/04/economic-divide-black-households/.

4. “L.A.'s Most Crowded Neighborhoods Fear Outbreaks: 'If One of Us Gets It, We Are All Going to Get It'.” Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times, 22 Apr. 2020, www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-04-22/how-does-overcrowded-housing-affect-the-spread-of-coronavirus.

5. Stafford, Kat. ABC News, ABC News Network, 1 June 2020, abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/black-businesses-hit-hard-covid-19-fight-stay-70997630.